By Ron Chen, Bureau Chief, Asia

A Modern Central Banking Infrastructure company, EMTECH has successfully delivered a 12-week CBDC Hackathon as a strategic pilot for the Bank of Ghana. This is the company’s latest technical partnership with Bank of Ghana, following the deployment of its Digital Regulatory Sandbox.

Announced on October 3, 2023 at the Money &DeFI Summit by the Bank of Ghana, the eCedi Hackathon has emerged as a historic flagship CBDC innovation challenge driven by the Bank of Ghana, showcasing how a central bank can collaborate with the innovation, banking and fintech ecosystems, while driving its own innovation. That collaboration is key to validating the market needs, testing technical capabilities, educating stakeholders and ensuring private sector alignment, prior to introducing a final solution.

EMTECH’s Beyond Cash™ solution was designed as a Web3-enabled Digital Cash Infrastructure that not only can interoperate with established payment rails, but that newer financial products can be safely built on and with. As Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) enters the deployment phase for many central banks, more are exploring their strategy to bring a digital version of central bank money (cash) in the era of Fintech, Open Banking, Web3 and AI. As a foundation, EMTECH’s Digital Cash Infrastructure is designed to make cash accessible, interoperable and trusted in this era. In order to deliver on the goals of financial inclusion and access, it is a unique opportunity for the future “currency infrastructures” to leverage new technologies such as APIs, Distributed Ledgers, Smart Contracts and Tokenization that further foster innovation of products that will ultimately be easy, low cost and faster for businesses and consumers.

The initiative successfully brought together developers, banks, fintech innovators and the Bank of Ghana to pilot how EMTECH’s tokenized CBDC solution could achieve key objectives and be used in use cases relevant to the Ghanaian market such as merchant payments, government payments, lending, crowdfunding, transparent taxation, etc. With partners such as West Africa, Ghana Fintech Association, HBAR Foundation and KPMG, the effort was deemed groundbreaking in many ways.

After receiving 88 applications, the BoG ultimately selected 10 participants who onboarded a dedicated hackathon platform, received Institutional Wallets and 1,000 BYDC-eCedi tokens from the BoG to prototype various solutions. They were then granted access to pre-built BYDC-eCedi APIs which eased the technical integration as well as standardized how and who can create wallets for end users or how to transact with the tokens. All transactions were performed using Hedera’s token and public ledger services that used a ERC-20 token standard and delivered transparency in transactions with privacy of a user’s information.

According to the Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr. Ernest Addison at the eCedi Hackathon Awards Dinner: “The invitation for proposals targeted innovative ideas that leverage CBDC tokens and APIs to prototype solutions or develop tools that will promote the use of eCedi across the various sectors of the economy and with diverse payment scenarios.” He later thanked: “EMTECH, the partner of the Bank of Ghana in the conceptualisation, design, planning and implementation of this event, we are very grateful for your partnership.”

EMTECH’s CEO Carmelle Cadet adds: “Bank of Ghana’s successful pilot with our web3-enabled technology stack showed foresight and leadership. It also establishes a template of “How To CBDC for the Web3 era” while collaborating with banks and fintech ecosystems. There’s a real opportunity to unleash the potential we know exists in fintech to make finance more inclusive and resilient. Our CBDC Hackathon Kit is a turnkey solution designed to make it a low risk, low cost and easy to use solution for central banks to ultimately deploy their CBDC successfully.”