DREX: nationwide CBDC infrastructure for Brazil's digital real

Kaleido is the technology vendor for Banco Central do Brasil's DREX initiative, providing blockchain infrastructure, advisory services, and deep technical collaboration across 16 sets of commercial banks, consortia, and Febraban as Brazil advances toward a production-grade digital real.
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Background

Banco Central do Brasil's Project Real Digital forms the foundation for Brazil's transition toward a production-grade digital real, known as DREX. The initiative examines the use of blockchain infrastructure, programmability via smart contracts, and privacy to demonstrate greater efficiency, transparency, liquidity, and accessibility across wholesale and retail use cases. The project involves 16 sets of commercial banks, consortia, and Febraban, the Brazilian banking consortium with over 100 banks involved.

Challenges

The initiative needed to simulate a national-scale financial environment using a Central Bank Digital Currency, testing the issuance of CBDCs to regulated institutions, DvP settlement of tokenized assets via smart contracts, and privacy-preserving data exchange among platform participants, while validating the programmability of financial services and interoperability with existing institutional systems.

Kaleido's role

As the selected technology vendor, Kaleido provides infrastructure entitlements, advisory services, and deep technical collaboration through pair programming, open source contributions, and hands-on training. The platform enables issuance of CBDCs to regulated institutions, delivery-versus-payment settlement of tokenized assets using smart contracts, and evaluation of privacy-preserving data exchange among platform participants.

Kaleido worked with Banco do Brasil along with 16 sets of commercial banks, consortia, and Febraban in the Real Digital test environment. Additional areas of testing include programmability of financial services and interoperability with existing institutional systems.

16
Bank and fintech consortia
Commercial banks, consortia, and fintechs participating in the Real Digital test environment under national CBDC initiative
100+
Banks via Febraban
Brazilian banking consortium with over 100 member banks engaged in the DREX initiative
Privacy + programmability
Core design principles
Privacy-preserving data exchange and programmability of financial services tested across all participating institutions and platforms
built with

See Kaleido's other use cases