The BIS Innovation Hub has unveiled its work program for 2023. This includes previously unannounced projects on stablecoins, DeFi, and CBDC.

Project Pyxtrial in Central London will monitor stablecoins to ensure supporting assets at least match stablecoin issuance. Pyxtrial plans to explore a variety of tools to allow supervisors and regulators to monitor stablecoin systems. The name of the project is based on the Trial of the Pyx, a historic UK process in which minted coins were tested to ensure they met specifications. Today, that’s done in a lab, but there are still occasional ceremonies.

To date, the BIS Innovation Hub has launched 26 projects, of which 21 are still active. Fifteen of the projects focused on central bank digital currency (CBDC). Three cross-border CBDC projects have concluded, including the Helvetia, Jura and Dunbar Project, leaving MBridge as the lead project further exploring the topic of wholesale cross-border CBDCs and the icebreaker for retail CBDCs.

Two ongoing CBDC projects have gone largely under the radar until now. They are Polaris for Nordic center offline CBDC and Titus in Switzerland. Titus launched last year to test an in-house blockchain proofing solution as well as liquidity saving mechanisms that we suspect may use DeFi, but limited details are available.

Another DeFi solution involves automated market making for currencies that is being tested as part of Project Mariana. And there is Project Atlas for monitoring public blockchain DeFi and cryptocurrency systems.

Blockchain was also used in multiple Hong Kong green bond trials as part of the Genesis Project, which has now concluded.