African country Swaziland releases tokenized retail CBDC design document

The central bank of the Kingdom of Swaziland, a landlocked country in southern Africa, has released a design document describing its potential CBDC plans, the digital lilangeni. According to the design document, the digital lilangeni will be a tokenized retail CBDC that runs on a distributed database, rather than a distributed ledger. The CBDC will host online wallets and hard wallets managed by financial institutions, most likely in the form of smart cards, which can function without internet access. The digital lilangeni will be used as an intermediary, with financial institutions using infrastructure operated by the central bank to distribute the currency to users. The CBDC will feature pseudo-anonymity, preserving privacy without compromising KYC and anti-money laundering requirements. For example, digital lilangeni payments will be programmable at the wallet level to enable automatic payments or limits on spending by children. (Cointelegraph)