The BIS Innovation Hub’s Swiss Centre has launched Tourbillon, a new project that explores improving cyber resiliency, scalability and privacy in a prototype central bank digital currency (CBDC).

Central banks have identified cyber resiliency, scalability and privacy as core features of CBDCs. However, designing them involves complex trade-offs between these three elements.

Project Tourbillon explores cyber resiliency, scalability and privacy in a prototype CBDC. Source: BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre

Project Tourbillon aims to reconcile these trade-offs by combining proven technologies such as blind signatures and mix networks with the latest research on cryptography and CBDC design.

The project will be designed based on the eCash 2.0 paper by researchers David Chaum and Thomas Moser, with the prototype to be finished by mid-2023.

Morten Bech

“Delivering a CBDC involves difficult trade-offs between cyber resilience, scalability and user privacy. Project Tourbillon will build and test a prototype that reconciles these trade-offs and pushes central banks’ technological frontier,”

said Morten Bech, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre.

Thomas Moser

“Many central banks are researching CBDCs in the context of the digital asset transformation. I am proud to be a co-author with David Chaum on the eCash 2.0 paper, which is serving as the basis for this project,”

said Thomas Moser, Alternate Member of the Governing Board at the Swiss National Bank.