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Banca d'Italia published a paper on the FROSTed Byzantine Fault Tolerance (FBFT) protocol, an approach to DLT proof of authority (PoA) validation meant to strengthen the security of the ledger, its tolerance to faults or attacks, and the confidentiality of validators. It combines the practical byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) algorithm with the flexible round-optimized Schnorr threshold (FROST) signature scheme. The resulting system is an alternative platform for a distributed, resilient transactional system. Operated by a set of trusted actors, distributed at geographic scale, it holds potential for mission-critical applications, such as wholesale and retail CBDC, and asset tokenization schemes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed an interest in accelerating the Bank of Russia's digital ruble CBDC pilots. At a meeting on economic issues on July 17, 2024, he called for a "broader, full-scale implementation of the digital ruble in the economy, in economic activity and in the field of finance". The pilot, which launched in August 2023, involved 12 banks, 600 individuals and 22 trade and service enterprises from 11 cities. As of July 1, 2024, 27,000 transfers and over 7,000 payments for goods and services have been done, which "the digital ruble platform showed its performance and functionality" and justifying taking the next step to "full implementation". http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/74566

Hedera Hashgraph chose Google Cloud Platform as its preferred cloud provider for deploying its public networks. Google commends Hedera for the choice, while revealing that it is taking an active stake in the project's governance.

The Reserve project is also going through the initial testing stage for its Reserve (RSV) decentralized governance stablecoin. The first phase of its development is centralized, where it will be fiat-collateralised and pegged to the US dollar. To get rid of this dependence, RSV will have to make a contrary step towards decentralization and utilize a "basket of assets," as of now to consist of three collateral tokens: USD Coin, TrueUSD and Paxos, while still keeping the USD peg until it's finally abandoned.

The city of Suzhou will give away 20 million DC/EP central bank digital currency (CBDC) via lottery, which is similar to the first one conducted in Shenzhen. However, for this pilot some of the 100,000 lottery winners (up to 1,000) will be selected to test an offline payment feature based on near-field wireless technologies. These DC/EP wallets will be capable of sending transactions between two smartphones or hardware devices even without an internet connection.