According to the press release, Project Sela "demonstrated the technical feasibility of a retail central bank digital currency architecture that can promote competition and innovation in digital payments by allowing non-bank payment intermediaries to connect directly to the CBDC ledger of the central bank. Leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT), a proof-of-concept prototype was developed to showcase how the technical implementation of the proposed architecture can incorporate strict cybersecurity, legal and policy requirements."

Commenting on the project, Morten Bech, Head of the BIS Innovation Hub Swiss Centre said: "Digital central bank money can make payments better and more inclusive. Yet 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."

Project Tourbillon will be relevant for both wholesale and retail CBDC systems and the prototype is expected to be finished by mid-2023.

Called Project Sela, the research will study the data security implications of a two-tier retail CBDC architecture where the intermediaries will have no financial exposure, and pioneer methods of making it more resilient to cyber-attacks. The Project is expected to be completed by the end of 2022.

The paper examines the views of central banks in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region toward CBDCs, drawing on their responses to a survey conducted by the BIS in 2020 and 2021.

It examines whether the engagement of LAC central banks with CBDCs can be explained by the structural characteristics of their economies.

The paper also reviews the list of potential benefits, costs and risks of CBDCs, focusing on their relevance to the LAC economies.

Finally, the paper reviews the design choices that central banks face and the actual choices made by a number of central banks in the region.