Norwegian central bank taps Ethereum for CBDC work

Norway’s central bank has made the source code for its CBDC sandbox publicly available and confirmed that the prototype infrastructure for the project is based on Ethereum technology.

Having first outlined plans to test a host of CBDC technical options last year, in May Norges Bank brought in vendor Nahmii to help with its sandbox project.

Now, the open source code has been made available on GitHub, allowing for the testing of basic token management use cases, including minting, burning and transferring ERC-20 tokens.

In addition to deploying the appropriate smart contracts and access controls, the Norges Bank sandbox includes a custom frontend and network monitoring tools.

The sandbox network sits behind basic authentication and is only accessible by users with the appropriate credentials, meaning transactions are private.

Nahmii says more complex and interesting use cases, such as batch payments, security tokens and bridges will soon follow.