Project Helvetia — SNB Wholesale CBDC
Project Helvetia is a multi-phase investigation by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) on the settlement of tokenized assets in central bank money. The pilot represents the world’s first issuance of a wholesale CBDC on a regulated third-party platform — SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) — to settle commercial transactions with tokenized assets. The SNB has explicitly ruled out a retail CBDC (digital Swiss franc for public use) while embracing wholesale CBDC for institutional settlement, creating a clear delineation between central bank innovation and consumer-facing digital currency that distinguishes Switzerland’s approach from most other CBDC programs globally.
The wholesale CBDC issued through Project Helvetia is a digital Swiss franc — a direct liability of the Swiss National Bank reserved exclusively for regulated financial institutions. It carries the same legal status as traditional SNB sight deposits used for interbank settlement through the Swiss Interbank Clearing (SIC) system. This legal equivalence ensures that tokenized bonds settled in wholesale CBDC achieve identical settlement finality to bonds settled through traditional payment infrastructure.
Phase Architecture
Project Helvetia evolved through three phases. Phase 1 (2020) was a proof of concept conducted with the BIS Innovation Hub and SIX, exploring the integration of tokenized assets with central bank money. The outcome demonstrated technical feasibility: wholesale CBDC could be issued on a DLT platform and used for delivery-versus-payment settlement of tokenized securities.
Phase 2 (2022) expanded to include Banque de France, testing cross-border settlement scenarios between Swiss wholesale CBDC and French CBDC pilots. This cross-border dimension addressed a critical institutional requirement: tokenized securities markets are inherently cross-border, and settlement infrastructure must accommodate multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction transactions.
Phase 3 (December 2023 to present) moved from experimentation to live pilot with real transactions. Participating banks — Banque Cantonale Vaudoise, Basler Kantonalbank, Commerzbank, Hypothekarbank Lenzburg, UBS, and Zurcher Kantonalbank — settle actual tokenized bond transactions using wholesale CBDC on the SDX platform. This is not a sandbox or testnet operation: real CHF-denominated central bank money changes hands in settlement of real financial obligations.
Settlement Mechanics
The wholesale CBDC mechanism operates as follows. The SNB issues digital Swiss francs — visible only to participating financial institutions, not available to the general public — on the SDX distributed ledger. These digital francs are liabilities of the SNB, identical in legal status to traditional SNB sight deposits held by banks for interbank settlement. Both the digital security (tokenized bond) and the payment (wholesale CBDC) exist in tokenized form on the same DLT infrastructure.
Settlement uses delivery-versus-payment (DvP): the digital bond and digital Swiss francs transfer simultaneously in an atomic transaction. This eliminates settlement risk — the risk that one party delivers securities while the counterparty fails to deliver payment — which in traditional securities settlement is managed through central counterparty clearing and settlement cycles (typically T+2). On SDX, settlement is instant and final, with zero counterparty risk because both legs of the transaction execute atomically.
Key Milestones (2024-2025)
The pilot has settled six digital bond issuances totaling CHF 750+ million in wholesale CBDC since December 2023. The World Bank’s CHF 200 million digital bond — the first CHF digital bond by an international issuer — was settled in wholesale CBDC in May 2024, demonstrating the platform’s readiness for sovereign and supranational issuers. The City of Lugano issued a CHF 100 million bond settled exclusively in wholesale CBDC in early 2024, bringing municipal finance onto DLT infrastructure.
The SNB’s issuance of CHF 64 million in SNB Bills on the SDX DLT platform represented a world-first in monetary policy operations on DLT — the central bank itself using distributed ledger technology for money market operations. This milestone signals that the SNB views DLT not merely as an experimental technology but as production-grade infrastructure suitable for core central banking functions.
In 2024, the SNB extended Project Helvetia III for at least two more years (until mid-2027), providing continued wholesale CBDC liquidity for SDX settlement operations. This extension signals sustained commitment — the SNB is treating wholesale CBDC as a medium-term operational reality, not a time-limited experiment.
Retail CBDC Position
The SNB’s explicit rejection of a retail CBDC (digital Swiss franc available to the general public) distinguishes Switzerland from countries pursuing retail CBDC programs (China’s e-CNY, the ECB’s digital euro). SNB leadership has articulated concerns about financial disintermediation (retail CBDC potentially drawing deposits away from commercial banks), privacy implications (central bank visibility into individual transactions), and the adequacy of existing Swiss payment infrastructure (SIC interbank system, TWINT mobile payments).
This wholesale-only approach means that Swiss stablecoins — DCHF, ZCHF, CHFAU — serve the retail and corporate payment token function that a retail CBDC would otherwise fill. The wholesale CBDC provides settlement infrastructure for institutional use, while privately issued stablecoins (subject to FINMA stablecoin regulation) serve non-institutional users.
International Context
Project Helvetia has influenced international CBDC design thinking. The BIS, which co-sponsors the project through its Innovation Hub (headquartered in Basel, 90 kilometers from Zug), has cited Helvetia as a model for how central banks can support tokenized asset markets without abandoning the two-tier banking system (central bank serves banks, banks serve the public). The cross-border settlement capabilities tested in Phase 2 inform Project mBridge and other multi-CBDC initiatives.
Project Agora — Multi-Central-Bank Collaboration
Project Agora, announced in April 2024, represents the internationalization of the wholesale CBDC concept pioneered in Project Helvetia. Organized by the BIS, Agora brings together central banks from Switzerland (SNB), South Korea, France, England, Japan, Mexico, and the United States to explore how tokenization of wholesale central bank money can improve the monetary system. Switzerland’s participation — anchored in the operational experience of Helvetia III with real transactions on SDX — provides practical insights that no other participating central bank can match.
Agora’s scope extends beyond bilateral settlement (which Helvetia Phase 2 tested with Banque de France) to explore a unified ledger concept where tokenized commercial bank money and central bank money coexist on shared infrastructure. The SNB’s experience managing wholesale CBDC alongside tokenized bonds on SDX directly informs the technical architecture and governance design under discussion. The potential for Agora to evolve into a production multi-CBDC settlement network would fundamentally transform cross-border institutional finance — and Switzerland’s first-mover experience positions its institutions to operate this infrastructure.
Implications for DeFi and Institutional Finance
Project Helvetia creates a bridge between traditional central bank operations and distributed ledger infrastructure that has profound implications for the broader DeFi ecosystem. By issuing central bank money on a DLT platform, the SNB validates DLT as production-grade financial infrastructure — a signal that resonates far beyond Switzerland’s borders.
For institutional DeFi adoption, wholesale CBDC provides the missing piece: settlement finality in central bank money. Tokenized bonds settled in wholesale CBDC achieve the same settlement finality as traditional bonds settled through the Swiss Interbank Clearing (SIC) system. This equivalence eliminates the settlement risk premium that institutional investors attach to blockchain-based settlement, removing a significant barrier to institutional tokenization adoption.
For DAO treasuries managed by Swiss-domiciled foundations and associations, wholesale CBDC creates a theoretical pathway for holding treasury assets in central bank-grade digital CHF. In practice, access to wholesale CBDC is currently limited to regulated financial institutions — not available to non-bank foundations or DAOs directly. However, through custody relationships with participating banks (UBS, Zurcher Kantonalbank, Hypothekarbank Lenzburg), foundations could potentially hold tokenized bonds settled in wholesale CBDC as part of their treasury diversification strategy.
The Two-Tier Monetary System and Stablecoins
Project Helvetia’s wholesale-only approach preserves the two-tier monetary system: the central bank provides settlement infrastructure for banks, and banks provide payment services for the public. The SNB’s explicit rejection of a retail CBDC means that consumer-facing digital CHF payment services remain the domain of the private sector — creating the market opportunity that Swiss stablecoin issuers (Sygnum’s DCHF, Frankencoin, AllUnity’s CHFAU) seek to capture.
This design creates a complementary structure. Wholesale CBDC (Project Helvetia) provides institutional settlement infrastructure. FINMA-regulated stablecoins provide retail and corporate digital payment instruments. The proposed payment institution license would formalize this structure by creating a dedicated regulatory category for stablecoin issuers, separate from banking (which provides wholesale CBDC access) and from crypto institutions (which provide custody and trading).
The Swiss Bankers Association has highlighted the risk that stablecoins could undermine banks’ intermediary role — every CHF held as a stablecoin rather than a bank deposit reduces banks’ loan refinancing capacity. The wholesale CBDC design partially mitigates this risk by keeping central bank money within the banking system while allowing the private sector to innovate in consumer-facing payment instruments. The final equilibrium between wholesale CBDC, bank deposits, and private stablecoins will be shaped by the legislative process around the 2025 proposals and by market adoption dynamics that remain uncertain.
Technical Infrastructure and Security
The technical infrastructure underlying Project Helvetia combines SDX’s regulated DLT platform with the SNB’s payment systems infrastructure. The wholesale CBDC is issued as a tokenized representation of SNB sight deposits — the same reserves that banks hold at the central bank for interbank settlement through the SIC system. The tokenized representation exists only on the SDX platform and is accessible only to institutions with SDX CSD membership.
Security architecture reflects the institutional-grade requirements of central banking. The SDX platform operates as a permissioned DLT network — not a public blockchain — with participant verification, access controls, and governance mechanisms appropriate for financial market infrastructure. The SNB maintains full control over wholesale CBDC issuance and redemption, ensuring that the total supply of digital CHF on the platform matches the SNB sight deposits backing it.
Caveats and Limitations
The SNB has explicitly stated that Project Helvetia does not constitute a commitment to introduce wholesale CBDC on a permanent basis. The pilot is an ongoing evaluation — the SNB continuously assesses the results before making permanent decisions about wholesale CBDC integration into Swiss monetary operations. Access remains limited to regulated financial institutions — DeFi protocols, non-bank DAO foundations, and retail users cannot access wholesale CBDC directly. The institutional-only design preserves the two-tier banking system and prevents financial disintermediation — concerns that the SNB has identified as primary risks of retail CBDC alternatives. The pilot’s geographic scope is also limited. While Project Agora explores multi-central-bank collaboration, the current Helvetia III implementation operates only within the Swiss financial system. Cross-border settlement — where a tokenized bond issued in Switzerland is settled in digital euros or digital pounds — remains in the exploration phase. The Phase 2 cross-border testing with Banque de France demonstrated technical feasibility, but production cross-border wholesale CBDC settlement requires bilateral or multilateral agreements between central banks that have not yet been finalized.
Despite these limitations, the operational scale achieved (CHF 750+ million settled, World Bank and SNB Bills issued) demonstrates that wholesale CBDC on DLT has moved beyond experimentation into production-grade financial infrastructure.
The extension of Helvetia III until mid-2027 provides time for the technical infrastructure to mature, for additional financial institutions to join, and for the regulatory framework to evolve. The DLT Act provides the legal foundation, Project Helvetia provides the settlement infrastructure, and the proposed license categories will provide the regulatory framework for market participants — creating a comprehensive institutional ecosystem for tokenized finance. The convergence of these three regulatory and infrastructure layers — DLT Act (legal), Project Helvetia (settlement), and new license categories (supervision) — positions Switzerland uniquely among global jurisdictions to support institutional-grade tokenized finance at scale.
Project Agora and Multi-Central-Bank Collaboration
Project Agora, organized by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), represents the next frontier of wholesale CBDC collaboration. The SNB participates alongside central banks from South Korea, France, England, Japan, Mexico, and the United States in exploring tokenization of wholesale central bank money across multiple currencies and jurisdictions. The project investigates how tokenized central bank money can enable cross-border settlement of tokenized financial instruments, reducing the friction, cost, and settlement risk inherent in current correspondent banking and CLS-based foreign exchange settlement. For Switzerland’s tokenized finance ecosystem, Project Agora represents a potential expansion of Project Helvetia’s capabilities from domestic CHF settlement to multi-currency cross-border settlement, enabling tokenized bonds and securities issued on SDX to settle in multiple wholesale CBDC currencies.
For SDX’s role as the platform hosting Project Helvetia, see our SDX profile. For the regulatory framework enabling tokenized bond issuance, see the DLT Act analysis. For stablecoin alternatives to retail CBDC, see our Swiss stablecoin landscape. For the banking institutions participating in Helvetia, see Sygnum Bank and AMINA Bank profiles. For DAO governance implications of CBDC infrastructure, explore our governance coverage. Track settlement volumes on our tokenized bond dashboard. For the CMTA standards used alongside wholesale CBDC settlement, see our entity profiles. For external reference, visit the SNB’s Project Helvetia page.