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Mastercard has announced that it has demonstrated a new solution that allows the central bank’s CBDC to be interoperable with different blockchains.
He solution, developed in partnership with Cuscal and Mintable, was part of a pilot project conducted by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Center (DFCRC) to explore potential use cases for a CBDC in Australia . The project involved 14 use cases, ranging from retail payments to wholesale settlements and cross-border transactions.
Mastercard’s solution allows CBDCs to be tokenized or “wrapped” on different blockchains, such as ethereum, without compromising central bank control and oversight. This means that consumers can use CBDC to engage in various forms of commerce across multiple blockchains, such as purchasing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or accessing decentralized applications (DApps).
The solution also includes controls that ensure that CBDC can be held, used and redeemed only by authorized parties, verified and risk-assessed by authorized service providers. This provides a layer of trust and security for both the central bank and CBDC users.
Mastercard demonstrated live how the solution could allow a pilot CBDC holder to purchase an nft listed on the public ethereum blockchain. The process “locked” the required amount of a pilot CBDC on the RBA platform and minted an equivalent amount of pilot CBDC tokens wrapped on ethereum. A prerequisite of the test transaction was that both the buyer and seller’s ethereum wallets and the nft marketplace smart contract were on the “allowed list” within the platform. All other transfers of the wrapped and locked pilot CBDC successfully demonstrated the platform’s ability to implement controls, even on public blockchains.
Richard Wormald, president of Mastercard’s Australasian division, said:
“As the digital economy continues to mature, Mastercard has seen consumer demand to engage in commerce across multiple blockchains, including public blockchains. This technology has the potential to drive more choice for consumers. “It opens up new opportunities for collaboration between public and private networks to drive genuine impact in the digital currency space.”
The pilot leveraged two pillars of the Multi Token Network, which Mastercard introduced in June 2023 as foundational capabilities designed to enable more efficient payment and merchant applications using blockchain technology. This includes Mastercard crypto Credential, which offers a set of common verification standards and infrastructure to enable trusted interactions using blockchain networks and interoperability to provide capabilities across all supported tokens and payment networks in a scalable manner.
