The Federal Reserve is an active participant in international efforts regarding payment systems via the Committee on Payments and Markets Infrastructures (CPMI) at the BIS. The CMPI collects best practices and issues recommendations for managing payments, clearing, and settlement risk across financial market utilities. At present, a high-priority area of study for the CMPI is coordinating the development of 24/365 RTGS systems – like FedNow – globally. Innovation in cross-border settlements will reduce liquidity outlays and settlement risks, leading in turn to cheaper cross-border payments. The New York Innovation Center and Project Cedar In the remainder of my remarks, I'd like to focus on an example of ongoing innovation research that is currently underway at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. To further enhance our ability to contribute to financial innovation globally, the New York Innovation Center, or NYIC, was established in 2021. The NYIC bridges the worlds of finance, technology, and innovation. Through technical research, experimentation, and prototyping, our team generates insights into high-value central-bank-related opportunities, enabling stakeholders and the central bank community to enhance the functioning of the global financial system. 3/5  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  Project Cedar is the inaugural project of the NYIC and represents the first stage of the NYIC's research efforts into CBDCs, the NYIC's biggest focus area in 2022. A goal of the NYIC is to progress CBDC research with an objective of defining a technical design for a CBDC addressing the wholesale market in the Federal Reserve context.
After taking a close look at the foreign exchange space with economists, traders, and market analysts, the NYIC team zeroed in on settlement of foreign exchange spot transactions as a first area of investigation. FX spot transactions are critical in the context of cross-border payments, and serve as a building block for longer, more complex transactions. Traditionally, settlement generally takes two days after a transaction, which leaves some room for improvement. By demonstrating improvements in settlement of FX spot transactions, the NYIC could address settlement time and risk, which would have implications to speed and access for the broader cross-border market. We are not the first to address this topic, of course, but the NYIC wanted to investigate it from the perspective of the Federal Reserve, through the lens of a wholesale CBDC. The NYIC developed a hypothesis that there is a distributed ledger technology solution for wholesale FX settlement that results in instant and atomic settlement in which a wholesale CBDC is the settlement asset. NYIC then built a working prototype and tested it. Results from the experiment indicated that settlement could occur in fewer than 10 seconds on average and that horizontal scaling was possible. This indicates that a modular ecosystem of ledgers has the potential for continued scalability, and that distributed ledger technology could enable settlement times well below the current industry standard of two days, with the added guarantee of atomic settlement.