National Payments¶

Sovereign money matters to people when they can pay with it everywhere they pay today. Instant payment systems have shown how quickly a country goes digital once paying by phone is immediate and cheap. Our payments initiative is designed to turn the money layer into a national real-time payment network that runs around the clock and covers payments between people, at merchants, between businesses, to and from the government, and across borders.

Everyday Payments¶

Residents pay each other by phone number or email alias, and pay at merchants by scanning a QR code that follows the national QR standard, so a shop that already accepts bank QR payments can accept sovereign digital money without new hardware. Payments settle in seconds at any hour, and fees, where the central bank allows them, are set by policy and bound atomically to each payment (Table 3). Businesses receive settlement directly in their wallets or bank accounts, and payroll and supplier payments run as batch transfers on the same rails.

Government Payments¶

In most economies the government is the largest payer and payee. On the payment network, benefits are paid as soon as they are approved, through the distribution service of the public services platform (Benefit and Asset Distribution), public salaries run as batch payments on the same rails, and taxes, fees, and fines are paid from the same app in which the resident applies. Program money can carry its purpose: a subsidy can be limited to approved merchant categories or regions, and unspent funds can return to the treasury when the program ends. The treasury sees its receipts and payments as they happen instead of at the end of a reconciliation cycle.

Cross-Border Payments and Remittances¶

Remittances and trade payments still pass through chains of correspondent banks that add cost and days of delay. On the SIGN Stack, a cross-border payment can travel as a regulated stablecoin on a public chain, or as a CBDC payment through the interoperability routes of Bridging and Interoperability, where each leg settles under its own central bank’s authority. Sending and receiving institutions verify each other’s customers with credentials instead of repeating the checks, and compliance screening applies to every payment and conversion.

Offline Payments¶

Sign CBDC is designed to support offline payments for rural areas, low connectivity, and outages. A device reserves an offline allowance on the ledger while online; during an outage the payer’s protected wallet and the payee’s wallet or terminal exchange signed payment evidence over QR codes, NFC, Bluetooth, or smart cards, and after reconnection the evidence is uploaded and settles through the normal transaction path. Offline value is bounded by per-payment, cumulative, and time limits. The ledger accepts only the first spend of any value, so offline payments cannot create money twice. The risk falls on a recipient whose payment settles second. The reserved allowance and secure device environments limit that exposure, as do monotonic counters, which only ever increase so that a device cannot reuse the same offline value. Conflicting evidence goes to a governed resolution process. Only a committed ledger result counts as settled. Each central bank chooses devices, channels, and limits to match its risk appetite. The BIS Innovation Hub Nordic Centre sets out this trade-off in its Project Polaris handbook on offline CBDC payments, which treats offline capability as a way to strengthen a CBDC’s security and resilience (source).

Direction: A Real-Time Economy¶

Our direction is a real-time economy on sovereign rails: one national payment network on which a payment of any size between any two parties settles in seconds at low cost, and, on the private path, the country’s payment data stays in the country.