Ripple is currently engaged with central banks around the world to better understand their goals and assess how Ripple’s CBDC solution can help them achieve those goals. We believe CBDCs will be a game-changer for Central Banks, enabling better interoperability of payments & transfers, accelerating retail-facing transactions, and promoting inclusive financial frameworks for digital assets.

Over the summer Ripple unveiled CBDC Innovate, a hackathon challenge offering enterprise and individual developers an opportunity to create CBDC applications for reward bounties. The challenge sought CBDC apps focused on interoperability, retail and financial inclusion and ran in two distinct phases: Phase I enabled participants to develop on the public XRP Ledger for a total prize pool of $47,000 USD and finalists had the option to utilize Ripple’s CBDC solution for a total $150,000 USD in Phase II.

The response to Ripple’s CBDC Innovate challenge has been overwhelming. Community buzz in Phase I resulted in thousands of inquiries and nearly 500 subsequent registrations. A select group of finalists were chosen by an esteemed panel of judges from the BIS Innovation Hub, DXC Technology, Amazon Web Services and much more.

These judges helped to determine the contestants moving on to Phase II, resulting in just six winners of Ripple’s CBDC Innovate.

🥁Meet the CBDC Innovate Winners

• In the Interoperability category, the enterprise winner was PeerPay, and the individual winner is P2P-CBDC (P2P-Loans)

  • PeerPay is an application that is an interoperable payment system focused on the unbanked. PeerPay is powered by Interledger and XRPL for sending fiat, crypto and CBDCs.
  • P2P-CBDC (P2P-Loans) is an application that features the benefits of no counterparty risk, near-zero fees and flexible terms - that's what financial inclusion on the XRP Ledger looks like.

• In the Financial Inclusion category, SpendTheBits won in the enterprise category while Community Loans was named the individual winer.

  • SpendTheBits is an application that allows users to make payments in multiple currencies including CBDCs, cryptocurrencies, and stablecoins. SpendTheBits incorporates a CBDC Portal, the STB Mobile and Merchant App, and STB Exchange Portal to allow interoperability and liquidity.
  • Community Loans is an application that allows users to give out and take loans in a peer-to-peer manner. Users can advertise loans they want to give out, with other users accepting those loans and finally, the loan advertiser choosing to accept the user that wants to take the loan.

• In the Retail-Facing category, the enterprise winner is Checksum, and the individual winner is conFIEL

  • Checksum’s advanced payment features and user interface enables businesses to easily process checks, invoices, expenses, and payroll for business-to-business (B2B) CBDC management.
  • conFIEL is an infrastructure project focused on the Mexican market that showcases how easy it is to onboard users into the XRP Ledger ecosystem by using the over 30 million deployed digital signatures used by the Tax Revenue Service in Mexico ("SAT").

We’re excited to announce the cash-prize winners in London this week at Ripple Swell Global: Ripple's annual flagship event that brings together the world's most influential voices across crypto, blockchain, payments, financial services and economic policy.

So many fascinating and unique applications were developed through the CBDC Innovate challenge, and it's exciting to see these ideas come to life in parallel with CBDC adoption around the world.

If you’re a dev wanting to start building on the XRP Ledger, head to the XRPL Developers Discord or XRPL.org.