Norway’s central bank has marked a major milestone in its digital currency efforts by open-sourcing the code for the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) sandbox.
Available on GitHub, the sandbox is designed to provide an interface to interact with the test network, enabling operations such as generating, burning and transferring ERC-20 tokens, Norges Bank’s official CBCC partner Nahmi said in a blog post.
Nahmi stressed that the current version of the code does not support the main Ethereum wallet MetaMask by design and can only be accessed privately by users with the appropriate credentials.
In addition to deploying appropriate smart contracts and access controls, Norge Bank’s sandbox includes custom front-end and network monitoring tools such as BlockScout and Grafana. The front end displays a searchable summary of transactions across the network, Nahmi said.
Norges Bank took to Twitter on Friday pointed out That the Norwegian CBCC prototype infrastructure is based on Ethereum technology.
The central bank previously made a reference to Ethereum in a CBCC-related blog post in May. Norges Bank’s Ethereum cryptocurrency system is expected to provide the “core infrastructure” for a digital central bank to issue, distribute and liquidate currency, it said. “The model will be used to test several important features for DSP,” the bank said.
As previously reported, Norges Bank officially announced in April last year that it had been testing CBDC challenges for two years, expecting to find a preferred CBDC solution.
In the year In November 2021, the central bank issued a working paper outlining CBDC designs, including those based on blockchains such as Ethereum, Bitcoin and Bitcoin SV. Norges Bank emphasized that working together is one of the most important problems considering various technical solutions.
Related: The Reserve Bank of India is gearing up to pilot CBDC with public sector banks and fintechs.
The news comes as the International Monetary Fund released a report indicating that as of July 2022, 97 countries, or more than half of the world’s central banks, are seeking or developing CBCCs. including Nigeria and the Bahamas, the IMF said.
In September, the IMF He said he was working on a project related to a workable CBDC platform that would connect multiple international CBCCs and enable cross-border transactions.