Sweden's Riksbank pilots its Central Bank Digital Currency, e-Krona

Sweden's Riksbank announced the commencement of e-krona digital currency tests.

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based e-krona is said to be a central bank digital currency that can work as a complement to cash.  The pilot aims to understand how the general public can use central bank-issued digital currency that complies with critical requirements for security and performance.

Accenture is helping Riksbank to conduct pilot tests. The pilot tests will run till February 2021. The solution is a permissioned blockchain network and leverages R3's Corda enterprise blockchain platform as its backbone, the announcement notes.

Major Opinion

The Riksbank press release said, "The recent sharp decrease in the use of cash in Sweden has made it more difficult to use cash in certain parts of Swedish society. Cash as so far been the only possibility for the general public to hold and pay with central bank-issued money. The Riksbank sees potential problems with the marginalisation of cash and has therefore initiated a pilot project to develop a proposal for a technical solution for a central bank digital currency, an e-krona that can work as a complement to cash."

The e-krona Pilot

The pilot solution distributes tokens to banks within its own e-krona network. The solution sports digital token called e-kronor. These tokens are portable, cannot be forged or copied (double-spent) and enable instantaneous, peer-to-peer payments as easily as sending a text.


As a part of the pilot solution, Riksbank will be the only entity that can issue and redeem e-kronor. Considering this, these tokens can be received and redeemed either from the participants' reservers or representative in the Riksbank’s settlement system, RIX.

e-krona solution will boost a digital wallet that is available in mobile phones, in the merchant’s cash register (terminal), digital watches and cards, notes the announcement.