Launched by the Swiss Center of the BIS innovation hub, project Tourbillon aims to demonstrate how to improve the resilience, scalability, and privacy of digital central bank money.
The Swiss Center of the innovation hub of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) last week announced a new research project called Tourbillon. The project team includes cryptographer David Chaum, founder of Ecash, a form of digital cash tested in the 1990s. Together with Thomas Moser, a deputy board member of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), Chaum published a study paper on Ecash 2.0.
Tourbillon will be used to study how to improve resilience, scalability, and data protection as a prototype central bank digital currency (CBDC) and is slated for completion by mid-2023. The results will be relevant to both wholesale and retail CBDCs, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).
Balancing Trade-Offs
Privacy and anonymity are the most difficult requirements of a CBDC, requiring tradeoffs between the three elements of cyber resilience, scalability, and privacy. Project Tourbillon aims to balance these by combining technologies such as blind signatures and mixed networks with research on cryptography and CBDC design proposed by Chaum and Moser in the recent Ecash 2.0 study.
The SNB is also involved in the Mariana project, which aims to explore automated market makers for foreign exchange transactions in cross-border CBDC payments, finews.com reported.
