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Today it was announced that Bitt and IDEMIA won the 2022 G20 TechSprint, where the topic was central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). For the competition, Bitt’s Digital Currency Management System (DCMS) was combined with IDEMIA’s secure offline CBDC wallet.
The hackathon was operated by the Bank of Indonesia in conjunction with Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and attracted 100 projects. These were reduced to 21 finalists across three themes. The Bitt-IDEMIA project was in the financial inclusion category.
The solution beat some major players in the sector, including FIS, Mastercard, R3, Ripple, Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) Filia and Partior.
“Our solution gives everyone access to CBDC, even to those who cannot afford a smartphone. We help fulfill the vision to make digital cash available anywhere and anytime, with or without network coverage,” said Jerome Ajdenbaum, VP of Digital Currencies at IDEMIA.
IDEMIA’s offline wallet supports consecutive offline payments with immediate settlement. The recipient can be either online or offline. The card looks like any payment card and has a tamper-resistant hardware chip that allows balance management, user authentication and key storage.
France’s IDEMIA is known for its biometrics solutions and is reportedly up for sale by its private equity owner Advent International for $4.6 billion.
Meanwhile, Bitt has multiple CBDC projects on the go. It has the contracts for the Eastern Caribbean DCash solution and won the contract for Nigeria’s eNaira, which is live. It also has a tokenized money project in Ukraine with Stellar, but that was announced before the war.
In July, Bitt took on the CBDC team from Criteo, which had multiple CBDC projects after Criteo was one of three winners of last year’s Singapore’s Global CBDC Challenge.
