The Hong Kong Monetary Authority announced project Ensemble, a new wholesale central bank digital currency, to support the development of the tokenization market.
It will explore innovative financial market infrastructure that will facilitate seamless interbank settlement of tokenized money through wholesale CBDCs.
The project will initially focus on tokenized deposits, which are digital representations of commercial bank deposits, issued by commercial banks and made available to the general public.
HKMA aims to launch a sandbox platform for the wholesale CBDC by the end of June to further research and test tokenization use cases. The project is being undertaken in collaboration with HashKey, a digital asset financial services group.
Bank of China (Hong Kong) (2388), the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation and Hang Seng Bank (0011) took part in a wholesale CBDC by supporting research and experimentation in different scenarios and exploring the local applications of tokenized currencies and real-world assets.
In other news, Hong Kong's foreign exchange reserves rose 0.4 percent to US$425.1 billion (HK$3.32 trillion) in February over the previous month.
