The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is collaborating with central banks in Europe to develop a crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) tracking system.
In a new publication, the BIS unveils Project Atlas, a data-gathering platform created in conjunction with the Deutsche Bundesbank and De Nederlandsche Bank that aims to “shed light on the macroeconomic relevance of crypto assets and DeFi.”
[adinserter block="1"]According to the BIS, Project Atlas will combine off-chain data and on-chin data to create novel statistics as well as vet existing information.
“Project Atlas aims to close some of the existing data gaps by developing a specialized data platform encompassing various data sources to illuminate the macroeconomic significance of crypto and DeFi.
The proof of concept (PoC) provides insights into cross-border flows. Tailored to the needs of central banks and financial regulators, it fuses data gathered from crypto exchanges (off-chain data) with public blockchain data (on-chain data) gathered via operating a node.
Off-chain data include any data not extracted from the ledgers, such as trades that crypto exchanges settle internally. The benefits of connecting off- and on-chain data lie in creating novel statistics and the vetting of existing ones.”
Project Atlas aims to track and estimate the flow of digital assets across specific geographic locations.
According to its initial findings, although the identified flows between crypto exchanges have been relatively small compared to on-chain traffic, they are “significant and substantial economically.”
“As part of a first proof of concept, Project Atlas derives crypto asset flows across geographical locations. The approach uses transactions attributed to crypto exchanges in the Bitcoin network, along with the location of those exchanges, as a proxy for cross-border capital flows.
The country location is not always discernible for crypto exchanges, and attribution data are naturally incomplete and possibly not perfectly accurate. Therefore, the flows should be regarded as a lower-bound estimate of the actual size.”
Other key contributors to the project include the Bank of France and the European Central Bank.
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