Hong Kong starts live-market trial of wholesale CBDC

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has launched a live-market trial of a wholesale central bank digital currency, applying tokenised central bank funds in actual market trades to test interbank and securities settlement.

The HKMA described the exercise as moving the wholesale CBDC beyond laboratory testing into real trading conditions. The trial lets banks and eligible market participants use tokenised central bank money in live transactions to observe how it performs during routine market activity.

Participants include banks and institutional market players that normally take part in interbank lending, foreign-exchange and securities transactions. They will use digital central bank balances to settle trades while the trial assesses operational features such as settlement finality, liquidity management and coordination between payment and securities ledgers.

The environment is set up as a live-market setting rather than a closed simulation, so transaction timing, counterparty interactions and market liquidity will follow routine behaviour. The exercise will track how token transfers occur in practice, how settlement events are time-stamped, and how interfaces with custodians and financial market infrastructures operate.

Technical questions the trial will examine include whether tokenised central bank balances can be exchanged atomically for securities to reduce settlement risk, how real-time gross settlement and intraday liquidity are affected, and how the wholesale CBDC can connect with existing messaging standards used by clearing houses. The project also addresses governance and operational procedures when central bank money exists in a tokenised form accessible to financial institutions.

Authorities plan to use the testing to determine operational readiness and to identify legal, regulatory or technical adjustments that may be needed before any wider deployment. The live-market framework allows regulators to monitor system resilience under normal trading volumes and to assess controls for access, anonymity and anti-money-laundering compliance for institutional transactions.

Wholesale CBDC is intended for use by banks and payment system members for large-value and securities settlement, not for general retail payments. Hong Kong’s live-market trial builds on earlier pilots by other central banks and runs transactions under real market conditions to inform technical design choices and regulatory approaches to tokenised central bank money in wholesale markets.