Wholesale CBDC Explained: e-Rupee-W, Helvetia, Agora and Pontes

At a public sector bank's treasury desk in Mumbai, a dealer lends to another bank overnight in the call money market. Since October 2023, for a group of nine banks, the cash leg of some of those deals has moved not over the RTGS system but as wholesale digital rupees, settled the same day. Nobody outside the dealing room noticed. That is the point of wholesale CBDC: it changes the plumbing under markets without asking the public to download anything.

What a wholesale CBDC is, and what it is not

Central banks already provide digital money to banks. Reserve balances at the RBI, the ECB or the Swiss National Bank are entries in a central bank ledger, moved through real-time gross settlement systems. So what is new? A wholesale CBDC puts central bank money into a form that can live on a shared or programmable ledger, often alongside tokenised securities. That lets the cash leg and the asset leg of a trade settle together in one step, a pattern known as atomic delivery versus payment, and lets institutions write rules into the settlement itself.

The RBI's October 2022 concept note drew the line clearly: retail CBDC for everyone, wholesale CBDC restricted to select financial institutions for interbank transfers and wholesale settlement. A wholesale CBDC is not a stablecoin and not a tokenised bank deposit; it is a claim on the central bank itself. For the full taxonomy, see stablecoins vs CBDC vs tokenised deposits.

India's e-rupee-W: bonds, then call money, then tokenised CDs

The wholesale pilot began on 1 November 2022, a month before the retail pilot. Nine banks took part: State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, IDFC First Bank and HSBC, settling secondary-market trades in government securities, as FinTech Futures reported at launch. The RBI's stated aim was a more efficient interbank market with lower costs, by reducing the need for settlement guarantee infrastructure or collateral.

The second use case followed in October 2023. According to Business Standard, nine banks, four public and five private, began settling call money trades in e-rupee instead of RTGS, on a same-day basis, with the rest of the operating process unchanged. The roadmap described by people familiar with it ran from bonds to call money to repo and then asset tokenisation.

The tokenisation step arrived in 2025-26. The RBI said in its annual report that it had begun a pilot to issue and trade certificates of deposit in tokenised form on its Unified Markets Interface, with settlement in wholesale CBDC, as OrissaPOST reported. For 2026-27 the bank has said it will explore more tokenisation pilots, widen participants and set up a CBDC and Asset Tokenisation sandbox. We cover the asset side in real-world asset tokenisation.

Worked example: what changes in a call money trade

Take a single overnight loan. Bank A lends ₹200 crore to Bank B at 6.72%, the weighted average call rate on the day Business Standard reported the pilot. Interest for one night is ₹200 crore × 6.72% ÷ 365, or about ₹3.68 lakh. Bank B repays ₹200.0368 crore the next day.

• Through RTGS. The trade is agreed on the dealing system, cleared, and the cash moves between the two banks' reserve accounts at the RBI.
• Through e-rupee-W. The trade is agreed the same way. The cash leg moves as wholesale e-rupee tokens from Bank A's wallet to Bank B's, settling the same day. On maturity, ₹200.0368 crore in tokens moves back.

The interest is identical. The credit risk is identical. What changes is the settlement asset and the ledger it moves on. For a plain overnight loan, the benefit is modest. The value shows up when the cash leg can be tied to something else: a tokenised CD that transfers only if the payment does, a repo where collateral and cash swap in one step, or a cross-border trade where two currencies move together. That is why the RBI's sequence ends with tokenisation rather than call money.

The ₹200 crore trade is illustrative; volumes in the e-rupee-W call money pilot have not been published.

Switzerland's Helvetia: wholesale CBDC in production

The Swiss National Bank has gone furthest toward making wholesale CBDC routine. It has provided wholesale CBDC on SIX Digital Exchange since the end of 2023, when the first tokenised transaction was settled, so that digital bonds traded there can settle against central bank money on a delivery-versus-payment basis. The pilot, known as Helvetia III, was extended by two years in June 2024 and, after a review, by another year to at least mid-2027, according to Finadium.

The 2025 extension also widened the approach. BX Digital, which plans a trading venue for tokenised assets, gets a production connection to the Swiss Interbank Clearing system, so tokenised trades can settle in ordinary central bank money through a bridge rather than as a token. The SNB stresses that none of this is a promise to offer wholesale CBDC permanently. That caution is telling: even the most advanced central bank in this area keeps both routes open.

Cross-border: Mariana, Agora and mBridge

Domestic settlement is the easy half. The bigger prize is cross-border, where a payment today passes through a chain of correspondent banks, as we explain in correspondent banking explained.

Project Mariana, run by the BIS with the Banque de France, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Swiss National Bank, tested trading and settling hypothetical euro, Singapore dollar and Swiss franc wholesale CBDCs on a public blockchain using an automated market maker. Its final report in September 2023 found the approach feasible, while stressing that the work was experimental.

Project Agorá is the more consequential effort. Launched in April 2024 with eight central banks, including those of five major reserve currencies, and more than 40 financial institutions convened by the Institute of International Finance, it built a shared programmable platform where tokenised reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits sit side by side. Its main report came out on 27 May 2026. In July 2026, 28 institutions and central banks ran real-value tests in several currencies, about CHF 800,000 in total across 17 scenarios, with individual payments from CHF 9,000 to CHF 125,000.

Project mBridge, a multi-CBDC platform built by a group of central banks, shows what scale looks like. By the end of November 2025 it had processed 4,047 cross-border payments worth a cumulative 387.2 billion yuan, with the digital yuan accounting for about 95.3% of transaction value, according to BeInCrypto figures republished by Yahoo Finance. That concentration is the story: a multi-currency platform that runs mainly on one currency. See our mBridge explainer.

Europe's Pontes: the bridge went live in September 2026

The Eurosystem took a different route. Instead of issuing a wholesale CBDC token, it connected DLT platforms to its existing settlement system. On 21 September 2026 it launched Pontes, which lets wholesale transactions in tokenised assets settle in central bank money, according to the ECB press release. Four market DLT operators were named: Axiology, Cashlink, Clearstream and SWIAT. Thirteen market participants plus the Bundesbank had onboarded at launch.

The ECB's own timeline sets out what comes next: settlement finality, support for all T2 currencies and T2-aligned operating hours in 2027, then overnight liquidity for tokenised central bank money and a stated aim of 24/7 opening in the second half of 2028. Alongside sits Appia, a longer-term roadmap for a tokenised European financial system run with Danmarks Nationalbank, which aims for a blueprint by 2028. This followed exploratory trials from May to November 2024 involving 64 market participants and more than 50 experiments, according to Payment Expert.

The projects compared

Why central banks start with wholesale

Look at where the real money is moving and a pattern stands out. Wholesale projects are live or near-live in India, Switzerland and the euro area. Retail CBDC is still in pilot in India and still in legislation in Europe. That ordering is deliberate.

First, wholesale CBDC avoids the hardest political question in retail CBDC: what happens to bank deposits. In a non-binding technical analysis reported by MNI in October 2025, ECB staff estimated that in a severe stress case where every user held the maximum €3,000 in a retail digital euro, outflows could reach €699 billion, about 8.2% of retail sight deposits. A wholesale CBDC sits among institutions that already hold central bank money, so there is no such question.

Second, tokenised markets are coming whether or not central banks join. If tokenised bonds settle in stablecoins or tokenised deposits only, the safest settlement asset, central bank money, is absent from the newest markets. Pontes and Helvetia are, at heart, defensive moves to keep central bank money as the anchor.

Third, wholesale is where programmability is uncontroversial. Nobody worries about civil liberties when a bond and its payment swap atomically. The same feature in a citizen's wallet raises questions we explore in the CBDC privacy debate.

Wholesale CBDC is the part of the CBDC story where central banks are protecting their role rather than reinventing the citizen's wallet.

What to watch next

• 2026-27, India: the RBI's plans for more tokenisation pilots and the CAT sandbox; the first published volumes for e-rupee-W would be a useful signal.
• 2027, euro area: Pontes adds settlement finality, multi-currency T2 support and 22.5-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week operation.
• Mid-2027, Switzerland: the current end date for Helvetia III; watch whether the SNB extends again or commits to a permanent service.
• Second half of 2028: Pontes enhanced products and Appia's blueprint for an integrated DLT-based financial system.
• Agorá's next phase: the BIS says testing continues with a larger role for the private sector.

For the retail side of the same story, see our CBDC tracker.

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