Central Bank of Qatar Announces CBDC Project

Qatar Announces CBDC Experimental Pilot Project

More countries are interested in issuing their central bank digital currencies. The Central Bank of Qatar recently announced the completion of the development stages for its central bank digital currency (CBDC) infrastructure. According to official news reports, Qatar’s CBDC project will serve “to keep pace with the rapid global developments in this field.”

The project seems to be a wholesale CBDC, as the bank announced it will start to test the implementation of this development in October 2024 with national and international banks, testing transactions of large payments in a trial environment.

Qatar’s CBDC pilot will focus on institutional adoption, mentioning increased access to capital markets for banks operating in the country, enhancing domestic settlement, and improving the efficiency of securities transactions as the objectives of this project.

This move is part of a national strategy involving new technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance Qatar’s liquidity in financial capital markets, considering information security aspects. The results of this upcoming experimentation phase will be considered in identifying the main use cases that the central bank will adopt to enhance the current capabilities of the Qatari financial system in the future.

Before, the bank had made statements regarding its exploration of digital banks and central bank digital currencies. In 2022, Alanood Abdullah Al Muftah, the head of the bank’s fintech division, clarified that the bank would study these elements, but stressed that the decision to issue a CBDC was still being considered and would not be taken until after examining all the circumstances surrounding it.