Brooks Entwistle expressed:  “As a mountain guy with a passion for the Himalayas and a long-time family interest in Bhutan through my three daughters’ service, I am personally super excited to see the Kingdom become the first country to pilot a CBDC with @Ripple. Go Higher!”

Ripple announced their partnership with Bhutan’s Central Bank, the Royal Monetary Authority (RMA).

The RMA will be using Ripple’s CBDC Solution to pilot the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in phases.

This is happening because of the nation’s desire to improve digital and cross-border payments to further expand financial inclusion efforts to further extend its commitment to sustainability in being the only carbon-negative country in the world.

Bhutan is taking part in financial innovation and thus supporting inclusion.  The RMA is a leader in financial innovation. They are building on the top of the country’s payment infrastructure and capabilities.  This initiate is expected to tap the CBDC solution to support seamless retail, cross-border and wholesale payment use cases for a digital Ngultrum.

The RMA believes that financial inclusion is possible due to easier, faster and more affordable payments, both domestically and internationally by 85% by 2023.

The technology underlying the XRP Ledger is powerful.  It is combined with Ripple’s experience in cross-border payments and tokenization. It is expected to harness tremendous speed, cost and innovation advantages in this mission.

A Sustainable CBDC is what Ripple facilitates.  Apart from technology, Ripple’s commitment to sustainability is important for Bhutan.  The CBDC solution is carbon-neutral.  It is based on the public XRP Ledger.  It is 120,000x more energy efficient than proof-of-work blockchains.

A country that focuses on being carbon neutral will find this combination of innovative finance with sustainability to be a natural fit.

The CBDC solution from Ripple leverages the private version of the public, open-source XRP Ledger (XRPL). The core technology is accepted by more than 5,400 different third party tokens which have been issued and traded on the XRPL so far via its integrated decentralized exchange (DEX) and custom token functionality.

When building on the top of the technology, Ripple’s CBDC solution makes sure that Central banks will have greater control over issuance, management, privacy, and validation than when compared to public blockchains.

Apart from privacy, the CBDC solution has been custom designed to deal with payments at the volume of transactions which is needed for a successful retail CBDC. This facilitates central banks like the RMA with the security, control and flexibility that they will need to deploy a CBDC without having to compromise financial stability or monetary policy objectives.

Moving money through Ripple’s CBDC solution is cost-effective, reliable and literally instantaneous. Thus, this solution makes it possible for RMA to eventually access a network of CBDC ledgers for full settlement interoperability, at the same time maintaining monetary and technological independence.