EMTECH, a Modern Central Banking Infrastructure company, has delivered a 12-week Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Hackathon as a strategic pilot for the Bank of Ghana.
The eCedi Hackathon has emerged as a historic flagship CBDC innovation challenge driven by the Bank of Ghana, showcasing how a central bank can collaborate with the innovation, banking and fintech ecosystems, while driving its innovation.
A statement issued in Accra said the collaboration was key to validating the market needs, testing technical capabilities, educating stakeholders, and ensuring private sector alignment, before introducing a final solution.
It said EMTECH’s Beyond Cash solution was designed as a Web3-enabled Digital Cash Infrastructure that not only could interoperate with established payment rails but that newer financial products could be safely built on and with.
It said as CBDC entered the deployment phase for many central banks, more were exploring their strategy to bring a digital version of central bank money (c
ash) in the era of Fintech, Open Banking, Web3 and AI.
The statement said as a foundation, EMTECH’s Digital Cash Infrastructure was designed to make cash accessible, interoperable, and trusted in this era.
‘To deliver on the goals of financial inclusion and access, it is a unique opportunity for the future ‘currency infrastructures’ to leverage new technologies such as APIs, Distributed Ledgers, Smart Contracts and Tokenization that further foster innovation of products that will ultimately be easy, low cost and faster for businesses and consumers,’ it said.
The statement said the initiative successfully brought together developers, banks, fintech innovators and the Bank of Ghana to pilot how EMTECH’s tokenized CBDC solution could achieve key objectives and be used in cases relevant to the Ghanaian market such as merchant payments, government payments, lending, crowdfunding, and transparent taxation.
‘With partners such as West Africa, Ghana Fintech Association, HBAR Foundation and KPMG, the effort was de
emed groundbreaking in many ways,’ it said.
It said after receiving 88 applications, the BoG ultimately selected 10 participants, who onboarded a dedicated hackathon platform, received Institutional Wallets and 1,000 BYDC-eCedi tokens from the Central Bank to prototype various solutions.
They were then granted access to pre-built BYDC-eCedi APIs which eased the technical integration as well as standardized how and who can create wallets for end users or how to transact with the tokens.
It said all transactions were performed using Hedera’s token and public ledger services that used an ERC-20 token standard and delivered transparency in transactions with the privacy of a user’s information.
Dr. Ernest Addison, the Governor of the BoG speaking at the eCedi Hackathon Awards Dinner said, ‘The invitation for proposals targeted innovative ideas that leverage CBDC tokens and APIs to prototype solutions or develop tools that will promote the use of eCedi across the various sectors of the economy and with diverse
payment scenarios.’
He commended EMTECH for partnering with the BoG in the conceptualisation, design, planning and implementation of this event, we are very grateful for your partnership.
Madam Carmelle Cadet, EMTECH’s CEO said, ‘Bank of Ghana’s successful pilot with our web3-enabled technology stack showed foresight and leadership.’
She said it also establishes a template of ‘How To CBDC for the Web3 era’ while collaborating with banks and fintech ecosystems.
There is a real opportunity to unleash the potential we know exists in fintech to make finance more inclusive and resilient.
Our CBDC Hackathon Kit is a turnkey solution designed to make it a low-risk, low cost and easy-to-use solution for central banks to ultimately deploy their CBDC successfully.
Source: Ghana News Agency
