The central bank of Norway, Norway's Norges Bank, recently released the open source code for the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) sandbox. The news came amid the International Monetary Fund, IMF, releasing its special report indicating that 97 countries, or more than half of global central banks, were exploring or developing CBDCs as of July 2022 (https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2022/09/Picture-this-The-ascent-of-CBDCs). On the other hand, only two countries have fully launched CBDC projects so far, including Nigeria and The Bahamas, the IMF wrote in the report.

Available on widely popular platform and company which went public recently, GitHub, the sandbox offers an interface for interacting with the test network, enabling functions like minting, burning and transferring Ethereum-network-enabled, ERC-20, tokens.

A representative of Norges Bank suggested that the current version of the code does not support the major Ethereum wallet MetaMask by design and is only privately accessible by users with appropriate credentials. In addition to deploying the appropriate smart contracts and access controls, the Norges Bank sandbox includes a custom frontend and network monitoring tools like BlockScout and Grafana. The front end also shows a filterable summary of transactions on the network, Nahmii noted.

The Norges Bank took to Twitter on Friday to mention that Norway’s CBDC prototype infrastructure is based on Ethereum technology.

The central bank previously made a reference to Ethereum in a CBDC-dedicated blog post in May. The Norges Bank stated that the Ethereum cryptocurrency system is expected to provide a “core infrastructure” for issuance, distribution and directly competitive digital central bank money, which is also referred to as DSP. “The prototype will be used to test a number of the important features for DSP,” the bank said in its report.

These and similar events, along with the ongoing hard fork to activate PoS protocol, act as multipliers for ETH expected performance – both against its main rival Bitcoin (BTCUSD) and in absolute terms.