Payments platform Ripple Labs is collaborating with the central bank of Georgia to create the nation’s first central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot program.
In a new company blog post, Ripple says that The National Bank of Georgia (NGB) has chosen to partner with Ripple for its digital Lari (GEL) pilot project.
“The pilot will experiment with Ripple’s CBDC technology and evaluate the practical use cases to gauge potential benefits for the public sector, businesses and retail users…
NBG explained that it chose Ripple to support its national digital currency pilot due to its ‘deep understanding of the project’s purposes and use cases, as well as a full commitment to the project’s success, sustainable business continuity, clear project development roadmap, and gradual deployment approach to use-cases.’”
Ripple, which launched its CBDC platform powered by the XRP Ledger earlier this year in May, aims to prove to financial institutions and governments the ability to “seamlessly mint, manage, transact and redeem CBDCs” – features the NGB wants to test and evaluate.
“Ripple was chosen as NBG’s single technology partner during a rigorous selection process involving nine shortlisted companies which were assessed on their capabilities to support the pilot.
Now that the selection phase is complete, NBG will move to the pilot stage to test the Ripple CBDC platform in a live environment to enable them to evaluate select use cases.”
As stated by James Wallis, vice president of central bank engagements at Ripple,
“The National Bank of Georgia is taking a global lead in exploring how it can use blockchain technology to take its economy into the digital era. By harnessing the power of the Ripple CBDC Platform, this pilot will pave the way for transformative advancements in the utilization of blockchain technology within the public sector.”
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