The LIFT challenge, sponsored by Fenasbac and the Central Bank of Brazil, has chosen nine projects that provide various ideas on how the future digital real CBDC (central bank digital currency) may be incorporated into various applications.
Laboratory of Financial and Technological Innovations (LIFT) chose these nine projects as the most intriguing among 47 proposals submitted by 43 organisations. Companies from all around the world responded to the challenge such as Germany, USA, Israel, Mexico, Portugal, UK and Sweden.
The central bank stated the following about the criteria used to pick some projects and reject others:
[The central bank] attempted to strike a compromise between the diversity of the portfolio of ideas submitted to the laboratory and the requirement for comprehensive monitoring of the selected initiatives.
The central bank stated that the nine selected projects are extremely diverse from one another, and they all strive to incorporate the digital realm into various applications such as delivery vs payment solutions, payment versus payment solutions, Internet of Things (IoT), defi applications, and dual offline payment ideas.
Aave, Banco Santander Brasil, Febraban, Giesecke + Devrient, Ita Unibanco, Bitcoin Market, Tecban, VERT, and Visa do Brasil presented the nine selected concepts. For example, Giesecke + Devrient’s approach tries to leverage the CDBC as a mechanism to tackle the problem of dual offline payments.
Aave, the decentralised finance protocol, also outlined a project that would focus on lending while maintaining compliance with financial system laws through the use of defi technologies such as liquidity pools. Itau’s Unibanco project will focus on leveraging the currency to manage international payments, as well as the creation of a Colombian-specific application. Visa do Brasil’s application would use the token to finance SMEs via a defi application.
The Central Bank of Brazil intends to research all of these applications in order to gain a better knowledge of the usage of a digital currency, with the goal of eventually producing its own digital currency.
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