PANews reported on November 5 that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report on the results of the first phase of the pilot of Project Cedar, the first CBDC research project of its New York Innovation Center (NYIC). The first phase of the Project Cedar experiment examined the potential application of distributed ledger technology, especially blockchain, in enhancing cross-border payment functions. The 12-week experiment included the development of a wholesale CBDC prototype and revealed that wholesale cross-border digital currency transactions supported by blockchain technology can provide fast and secure payments. The report released today (November 4) summarizes the problem space, assumptions, design, and results of the experiment conducted in the first phase, which focused on wholesale cross-border payment use cases. The experiment simulated foreign exchange (FX) spot transactions, and currently, most FX spot transactions take two days to settle. In the test environment, transactions on the blockchain-enabled distributed ledger system were settled in an average of 15 seconds.

It is reported that the New York Innovation Center (NYIC), established in 2021, connects the fields of finance, technology and innovation. Project Cedar is NYIC's largest focus area in 2022. Project Cedar is a multi-phase research effort that aims to develop a technical framework for a theoretical wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) in the context of the Federal Reserve by exploring basic design choices and modular technical features.