Central Banking Infrastructure company, EMTECH , has delivered a 12-week CBDC Hackathon as a pilot for the Bank of Ghana . According to the press release, this is the company's latest technical partnership with the Bank of Ghana, following the deployment of its Digital Regulatory Sandbox.

The eCedi Hackathon has emerged as a flagship CBDC innovation challenge driven by the Bank of Ghana, showcasing how a central bank can collaborate with the innovation, banking, and fintech ecosystems while driving its innovation. That collaboration is key to validating the market needs, testing technical capabilities, educating stakeholders, and ensuring private sector alignment, before introducing a final solution. EMTECH's Web3 cash EMTECH’s Beyond Cash solution was designed as a Web3-enabled digital cash infrastructure that not only can interoperate with payment rails but that newer financial products can be safely built on and with.

As CBDC enters the deployment phase for many central banks, more are exploring their strategy to bring a digital version of central bank money (cash) in the era of fintech, Open Banking, Web3, and AI. EMTECH's digital cash infrastructure serves as a base, aiming to ensure that cash is easily accessible, interoperable, and trusted in this era. To achieve financial inclusion and accessibility, there's an opportunity for future currency systems to utilise technologies like APIs, distributed ledgers, smart contracts, and tokenisation.

This fosters innovation for products that are user-friendly, cost-effective, and swift for both businesses and consumers. Digital initiatives with Bank of Ghana The initiative brought together developers, banks, fintech innovators, and the Bank of Ghana to pilot how EMTECH’s tokenised CBDC solution could achieve key objectives and be used in use cases relevant to the Ghanaian market such as merchant payments, government payments, lending, crowdfunding, transparent taxation, and more. After receiving 88 applications, the Bank of Ghana ultimately selected 10 participants who onboarded a dedicated hackathon platform and received institutional wallets and 1,000 BYDC-eCedi tokens from the bank to prototype various solutions.

They were then granted access to pre-built BYDC-eCedi APIs which eased the technical integration as well as standardised how and who can create wallets for end users or how to transact with the tokens. All transactions were performed using Hedera’s token and public ledger services that used an ERC-20 token standard and delivered transparency in transactions with the privacy of a user’s information. About EMTECH EMTECH intends to build the next-generation API-First central banking infrastructure.

EMTECH provides software, data, and services that connect central banks to other regulators and financial services providers. Its platforms power regulatory data exchange, currency issuance, and currency movement in financial markets. .