Swiss Bankers Association proposes deposit tokens to create digital economy

The Swiss Bankers Association released a white paper on how Swiss banks can help the improvement of the country’s digital economy. A Swiss franc “joint” deposit token is the remedy the group settled on. 

Stablecoins have restricted penetration in the Swiss monetary method, even as finish-to-finish digitization is becoming a lot more frequent in business enterprise models, and no Swiss stablecoins are accessible by the common public, the paper says.

The authors of the paper recommend a range of stablecoins — that is, a deposit token “issued by regulated and adequately supervised intermediaries” — issued and redeemed by intelligent contracts and denominated in Swiss francs. The token could be made as a ledger-primarily based safety, rather than a set of directions, to present it with the greatest prospective.

The paper identifies 3 style solutions for a deposit token: Standardized tokens that any industrial bank can problem with a uniform typical, colored tokens that are issued by industrial banks to any requirements they opt for, and joint tokens that are issued by a licensed and supervised unique goal automobile consisting of participating banks. The authors choose the final decision.

Comparison of digital types of cash. Supply: SBA

A joint deposit token would facilitate cash creation due to its flexibility, have low costs and could earn interest when held in bank accounts. It would be much less liable to runs than tokens issued by person banks. Moreover:

“From a technical standpoint, all the financial and legal needs that have been identified can be met. […] In principle, the DT need to operate on a public blockchain with more protocols to guarantee adequate privacy and transaction efficiency.”

The token would ideally be a layer-two remedy usable in decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and capable of self-custody or bank custody.

The Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) has published a white paper on a digital Swiss franc, in which it outlines many styles of tokenised deposits on the blockchain https://t.co/SsPwziNRRm

— Central Bank Payments News (@cbpaymentsnews) March 14, 2023

Deposit tokens are a relative newcomer to the ranks of digital currencies. According to a current overview in The Washington Post, they originated in Project Guardian, an initiative the Monetary Authority of Singapore launched with a number of monetary institutions in May possibly 2022 that sought to discover DeFi applications in wholesale funding markets.

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JPMorgan, one particular of the participants in Project Guardian, executed the 1st DeFi trade on a public blockchain as portion of that project. JPMorgan and project participant Oliver Wyman released a paper discussing the merits of deposit token technologies in February.