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The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) will reportedly launch a pilot of its e-nairu that will be run on the "two-tier" model whereby the central bank designs and distributes the digital currency (CBDC) and regulated financial institutions provide it to individuals and businesses. The CBN hopes that this strategy will help it "address interoperability risks that might be associated with the implementation." The CBN reckons the risk of financial disintermediation can be addressed via the imposition of limits on e-naira holdings.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's New York Innovation Center (NYIC) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced Project Cedar Phase II x Ubin+, a joint experiment to investigate how wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) could improve the efficiency of cross-border wholesale payments involving multiple currencies. Project Cedar Phase II x Ubin+ will enhance designs for atomic settlement of cross-border cross-currency transactions, leveraging wholesale CBDCs as a settlement asset.

The Banca d'Italia published a paper that evaluates two solutions for synchronizing the asset-leg and the cash-leg of a DvP (delivery versus payment) transaction on distributed ledger technology (DLT) rails. Both use the Target Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) platform to provide the settlement services of the cash leg. The experiments showed that the proposed implementations can effectively contribute to safer and more efficient settlement of DvP trades, enabling interoperability with a wide array of DLT platforms, and different degrees of integration effort compared to other already established approaches. The implemented solutions preserve the atomic nature of a DvP transaction, building a "bridge" between the DLT asset management platform and the central bank payment system. In accomplishing this task, this architecture offers the potential to standardize communications with DLTs and, crucially, avoid the need to issue central bank money as cash tokens on DLTs - a key point of other approaches - thus preserving the central bank's control over the cash-leg of the DvP.

The Digital Dollar Project (DPP) announced today the launch of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) Technical Sandbox Program. It will serve as a collaborative space for the DDP participants and financial service providers, offering a neutral environment for the evaluation of technological, business, and policy approaches to CBDCs. Program participants will examine real-world technology, explore potential implications to business strategies and operations, and experiment to uncover possible use-case specific solutions. It is is slated to begin in early October with the inaugural cohort focused on cross-border payments.

"We propose an offline payment system (OPS) protocol for CBDC that allows a user to make digital payments to another user while both users are temporarily offline and unable to connect to payment intermediaries (or even the Internet). OPS can be used to instantly complete a transaction involving any form of digital currency over a point-to-point channel without communicating with any payment intermediary, achieving virtually unbounded throughput and real-time transaction latency. "

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) published a white paper on the first phase of its Global Layer One (GL1) tokenization initiative. GL1 is envisaged as a public permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) network developed by regulated institutions for use by the financial industry across jurisdictions to deploy inherently interoperable digital asset applications, governed by common standards and technology for assets, smart contracts, and digital identities. Financial institutions will be able to develop, deploy and use applications for financial industry use cases along the value chain, such as issuance, distribution, trading and settlement, custody, asset servicing, and payments. The whitepaper details the design principles, objectives, considerations and potential uses of GL1. GL1 plans to expand collaboration with more policymakers, central banks, regulators, international standards setting bodies and financial institutions as work on GL1 progresses.

Ulrich Bindseil (European Central Bank) and Omid Malekan (Columbia University Business School) posted a paper that discusses the properties of blockchain technology and how they can enable time structures and novel financial products that cannot exist in traditional financial architecture. The specific features described are streaming payments, omni-asset settlement, programmability, and financial architecture flattening (disintermediation). They provide examples of the unique products they enable, some of which might disrupt today's dominant payment and capital market solutions in the future. The authors also discuss the utility of blockchain technology in private (permissioned) networks, and the risks of public distributed ledger technology (DLT) networks and their mitigants.