50 Billion Won Scale 'Han Eun CBDC' Research Project... SK, Line Plus, Ground X Bidding (Comprehensive)

The Korean virtual currency market is a distant regulated financial market.

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Eun-byeol] The Bank of Korea announced on the 12th that a total of three companies, including Ground X, Line Plus, and SK Inc., have submitted applications to participate in the bidding for the 'Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Pilot Experiment Research' project.

The Bank of Korea stated, "We will select the contractor through a technical evaluation in July, followed by technical negotiations with qualified bidders."

The Bank plans to start the CBDC pilot experiment research project next month. The pilot experiment is divided into two phases, with the first phase focusing on creating the pilot experiment environment and checking the basic functions of the CBDC.

Specifically, a CBDC pilot experiment environment based on distributed ledger technology will be established in a virtual space (public cloud), where tasks such as CBDC issuance, distribution, redemption, and issuance of large-value payment electronic instruments to virtual participating institutions like banks will be attempted.

The experiment will also check whether participating institutions can issue small-value payment electronic wallets (such as smartphone apps) for users and provide functions like storing secret keys for the electronic wallets, whether users can exchange bank deposits for CBDC or convert CBDC back into bank deposits, whether CBDC can be transferred from the sender's electronic wallet to the recipient's electronic wallet, and whether users can purchase goods and services using CBDC.

The second phase will mainly address extended functions using CBDC and issues related to personal data protection. Major experimental tasks include ▲ cross-border CBDC remittances that do not require separate settlement processes ▲ CBDC purchases of digital artworks and copyrights distributed on other distributed ledger networks ▲ offline CBDC remittances and payments in environments without internet access.

The budget for this research project is 4.96 billion KRW, and the project period is within 10 months from the start date, with experiments scheduled to be completed by June next year.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.