The Bank of Korea recently announced that it will cooperate with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and other institutions to jointly carry out testing of wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDC)🎉. The focus of the experiment will be to explore the future feasibility of a monetary system based on wholesale CBDC. During the testing process, the wholesale CBDC will serve as the settlement asset for tokenized deposits of commercial banks, and the programmability of tokenized deposits will also be tested.

South Korea's financial regulators, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), will also be involved in supervision. This shows that the Bank of Korea’s willingness to explore CBDC technology is still strong💪. The difference between wholesale CBDC and retail CBDC lies in its target audience and usage scenarios. The former serves financial institutions, while the latter is for the public.

Notably, the trial will coincide with the unified ledger concept being developed by the Bank for International Settlements. The concept aims to integrate central bank digital currencies, commercial bank digital currencies and tokenized assets into a programmable network. Let’s wait and see what impact this trial will have on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin! 🚀