It was announced today that Bitt and IDEMIA have won the 2022 G20 TechSprint, where the topic was Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). For the competition, Bitt’s Digital Currency Management System (DCMS) was combined with IDEMIA’s secure offline CBDC wallet.

The hackathon was operated by Bank Indonesia in conjunction with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Center and attracted 100 projects. These were narrowed down to 21 finalists across three issues. The Bitt-IDEMIA project was in the category of financial inclusion.

The solution outperformed some of the major players in the industry, including FIS, Mastercard, R3, Ripple, Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) Filia, and Partior.

“Our solution gives everyone access to CBDC, even those who cannot afford a smartphone. We help fulfill the vision of making digital cash available anywhere, anytime, with or without network coverage,” said Jerome Ajdenbaum, Vice President of Digital Currencies at IDEMIA.

IDEMIA’s offline wallet supports consecutive offline payments with immediate settlement. The recipient can be online or offline. The card looks like any payment card and has a tamper-resistant hardware chip that enables balance management, user authentication and key storage.

France’s IDEMIA is known for its biometric solutions and is reportedly being sold by its private equity owner Advent International for $4.6 billion.

Meanwhile, Bitt has several CBDC projects underway. He has the contracts for the Eastern Caribbean DCash solution and won the contract for Nigeria’s eNaira, which is live. He also has a tokenized money project in Ukraine with Stellar, but that was announced before the war.

In July, Bitt took over Criteo’s CBDC team, which had several CBDC projects after Criteo was one of three winners of last year’s Singapore Global CBDC Challenge.