A Hong Kong-based blockchain company has made available a digital payments system that is meant to connect stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
Red Date Technology, a blockchain infrastructure company also in charge of one of China’s blockchain projects, created the Universal Digital Payment Network (UDPN) on January 19 in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum 2023 meeting.
GFT Technologies, a tech engineering company, and the law firm DLA Piper, which makes TOKO, a tool for making digital assets, are also working on UDPN. Based on its white paper, the UDPN is a platform for distributed ledger technology (DLT) that would do for stablecoins and CBDCs what the SWIFT network does for banks.
A press release from January 19 says that “several global tier 1 banks” are already testing the network for cross-border transfers and swaps using use case proofs of concepts (POCs).
The release didn’t say which banks were involved in the POCs, but The Bank of East Asia, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Akbank were all on a panel at the UDPN launch in Davos.
Also, no one knew what stablecoins would be used in the POC. In its whitepaper, the network does say that it only works with “CBDCs and governed fiat-backed stablecoin currency systems” as payment methods. It also says:
