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In late December, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) launched a supplier discovery exercise for the second iteration of its central bank digital currency (CBDC) DCash 2.0. The ECCB went live with the first DCash pilot in March 2021 which currently covers eight islands, including Antigua, Grenada, Montserrat and Saint Lucia. Vendors interested in participating in the Eastern Caribbean CBDC are requested to respond by January 22.
The technology provider for the first iteration was Bitt which is also the partner for Nigeria’s eNaira. Last year Bloomberg reported that Nigeria was talking to other technology providers because it wanted to control its own technology.
Regarding the Eastern Caribbean, the ECCB states that “as part of the pilot constraints the current system was not integrated with any other system including RTGS and financial institution’s core banking systems.” Last year another CBDC provider, eCurrency, announced an integration with RTGS provider CMA.
Integration with core banking systems is one of the key areas on which the ECCB plans to focus. Additionally, it wants to integrate with wallet and payment service providers, advanced payment use cases, identity, reporting and offline payments. Six advanced use cases are explored, including recurring payments, programmable payments and loyalty points. The list of questions also asks about support for cross border payments.
The ECCB’s DCash system is widely considered as live, despite the central bank describing it as a pilot system. Of eleven countries with live CBDCs, the ECCB’s DCash covers eight. The others are the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar, Jamaica’s JAM-DEX and Nigeria’s eNaria.
