Yesterday, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and FintechHK announced the six winners of their Global Fast Track CBDC competition. Companies now have the opportunity to work with the HKMA on central bank digital currency (CBDC) research projects.

The winners are:

• ARTA TechFin Corporation Limited (Best Technology)
• Bank of China (Hong Kong) (Best Use Case)
• Giesecke+Devrient (G+D Filia) (Best Technology)
• Hang Seng Bank (best use case)
• HSBC (Best Ecosystem)
• Visa (Best Ecosystem)

The competition was looking for solutions that covered a wide range of topics, including wholesale CBDC, retail CBDC, programmable money, interoperability, currency and liquidity management, and more.

Hang Seng’s use case winner involved an optimized payment platform for consumers, merchants and large corporations aiming for a better customer experience to encourage mass adoption of eHKD.

G+D Filia offers a token-based retail CBDC, which is designed to support offline payments and a variety of devices ranging from smartphones to smart cards and other hardware wallets.

Repeat CBDC Winners

Visa and G+D were also winners in last year’s Global CBDC Challenge organized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). The third winner of the competition was Criteo, which signed a dozen CBDC deals with central banks following its victory in Singapore. Criteo’s CBDC pool was subsequently sold to Bitt, and the joint team was one of the winners of a third global CBDC competition, the G20 Techsprint.

Meanwhile, the HKMA recently shared the results of its CBDC prototypes that included both a bank-brokered CBDC and a CBDC-backed stablecoin. In September, it moved from research to development and is working on critical infrastructure while testing use cases.

In addition to retail CBDCs, it is also involved in the MBridge multi-CBDC wholesale project, which uses CBDCs for cross-border payments. This involves the central banks of China, the United Arab Emirates and Thailand, along with the BIS Innovation Hub.