[NEWS] Startail Labs and other Web 3.0 companies participate in the Bank of Japan's "CBDC Forum"

On the 20th, the Bank of Japan announced that it will establish a "CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) Forum" and hold its first meeting. At the same time, it also revealed the 60 private companies that will participate.

The CBDC Forum will include Startale Labs Japan, the Japanese subsidiary of Startale Labs, whose CEO is Sota Watanabe, founder of the Japanese public blockchain Aster Network.

Other Web 3.0-related companies include Coincheck, Soramitsu, Tradewaltz, BOOSTRY, Datachain, and SBI R3 Japan.

Major companies such as Sony, Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Bank, PayPay, and NTT Docomo will also participate.

In its "Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Demonstration Experiment" published in February, the Bank of Japan announced that it would conduct a "pilot experiment" starting in April of this year.

At that time, the BOJ established a "CBDC Forum" to reflect the technology and knowledge of private businesses in the review work, and called for the participation of a wide range of private companies.

According to the announcement, the BOJ decided on the participating companies after considering "business and technical knowledge and track record related to retail payments," "the relevance of these to the themes to be discussed and examined at the forum," and "the diversity of participants and the perspective of covering a wide range of themes to be discussed and examined at the forum" in order to effectively advance fruitful discussions.

The first meeting was held at 3:00 p.m. on the 20th.

The BOJ plans to publish materials and other materials on the new "CBDC Forum" page on its website.

In order to issue CBDC, the BOJ built a system-based demonstration environment as proof-of-concept phase 1 from April 2021 to March last year, and verified basic functions such as CBDC issuance and distribution.

After that, in proof-of-concept phase 2, peripheral functions of CBDC were added to the demonstration environment built in phase 1 and feasibility was verified.

Pilot experiments began in April this year.

In this pilot experiment, an experimental system will be built that integrates the central system, the intermediary agency network, the intermediary agency system, and the endpoint devices,

and the plan is to confirm the end-to-end processing flow and identify issues and solutions for connecting to external systems.

Reference:Announcement
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