Spain Bank Proposes for Wholesale CBDC Project

• The Bank of Spain has announced a wholesale CBDC program.
• As per the bank’s official statement, it is unrelated to the EU Initiative.

Banks Spain has proposed a wholesale CBDC project, according to the coin desk on Monday. The proposal is for various financial institutions and technology service providers. According to an official statement from the bank, the program intends to increase the usage of CBDCs in wholesale transactions.

Wholesale transactions are those in which revenues are transferred between banks and financial institutions. Furthermore, the official statement stated that it intends to experiment with the integration of a Wholesale CBDC with financial assets and to assess the potential benefits and drawbacks of its implementation.

The companies who are interested in the project have all filed bids before the deadline, January 31, and have also stated that the initiative is unrelated to any research effort in the European Union.

The EU is exploring possible retail CBDC, regarded as the digital euro, so the central bank of France announced a project in September that is seeking to realize the benefits of the CBDC utilized at the wholesale level in the report.

The only difference between wholesale and retail CBDC is who gets access to it. All private sector and financial consumers can access retail or a general-purpose CBDC. Wholesale CBDC, on the other hand, is built with financial sectors having limited access.