ECCB 2023-2024 Annual Report

EASTERN CARIBBEAN CENTRAL BANK ANNUAL REPORT 2023 - 2024

DCash: Pilot Closes in Prepartion for Transition to DCash 2.0

T he P ilot The ECCB’s DCash Pilot ended in January 2024 following 34 months of live operation throughout the ECCU. The Pilot provided the ECCB with critical insights into the requirements for the development, deployment, maintenance and management of a

The design choice to develop a system built on distributed ledger technology was validated by the Pilot. The Pilot’s platform had high availability throughout the Pilot except for a platform service interruption in 2022. Transaction settlement finality, platform security and speed of transactions remained consistent throughout

the Pilot, with average transaction settlement time of under seven seconds per transaction. The participation of a cross-section of the ECCU population illustrated use cases for which a retail CBDC may offer compelling value to the financial system; those use cases included, among others, use of DCash in support of intra-regional commerce; day-to-day small value spending; and use of DCash in support of the creative and digital economies. The Pilot also highlighted a

retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) for the ECCU. The DCash Pilot tested a two-tiered retail system for the creation, issuance, circulation and destruction of a digital version of the Eastern Caribbean dollar. Within the Pilot the DCash - the digital version of the Eastern Caribbean currency - was minted by the ECCB and was issued by the ECCB only to financial institutions which then transferred DCash to their customers’ consumer or merchant

number of imperatives including eco-system development which a commercial CBDC deployment must address for impact and recurring usage. Financial institution participation remained high throughout the Pilot as financial institutions provided critical support for DCash distribution and user onboarding.

wallet. For non-bank DCash wallet holders, consumer wallets could be funded via DCash merchant tellers. All DCash transactions were recorded on a private permissioned distributed ledger, with each DCash wallet keeping a local history of all DCash transactions by the individual user, separate from the blockchain ledger for all users, and thereby preserving the users’ data privacy.

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