DNB and Commercial Bank of Dubai bring CBMT tokenised deposit sandbox to eight banks
Key points
- DNB and Commercial Bank of Dubai joined the CBMT sandbox within the past two weeks, raising total participant banks to eight.
- CBMT was founded by the German Banking Industry Committee, with Commerzbank, DZ Bank, Helaba and UniCredit as founding members; BNP Paribas and ABN AMRO joined one month prior to these latest additions.
- DNB's entry adds Norwegian krone as a fifth test currency, joining the euro, US dollar and Japanese yen already active in the sandbox.
- DNB's SVP Ole Morten Sunde stated the bank will test tokenised krone transfers between parties, cross-currency exchange, and securities settlement.
- The inclusion of JPY in the sandbox without a named Japanese bank participant suggests a further geographic expansion may be forthcoming.
Norway’s DNB and the Commercial Bank of Dubai have joined the Commercial Bank Money Token (CBMT) sandbox within the past two weeks, lifting total participation to eight banks. CBMT was founded by the German Banking Industry Committee, with Commerzbank, DZ Bank, Helaba and UniCredit as its original four members. BNP Paribas and ABN AMRO had joined a month earlier, marking the project’s first extension beyond Germany into broader Europe; the two most recent additions push it further, into Scandinavia and the Gulf.
DNB’s entry introduces a fifth test currency, the Norwegian krone, alongside the euro, US dollar and Japanese yen already in use. Ole Morten Sunde, DNB’s SVP and Head of Emerging Business Products, has outlined the bank’s sandbox agenda as testing how tokenised deposits denominated in Norwegian krone can move between parties, be exchanged across currencies, and settle securities. That three-part description signals an intent to stress the infrastructure across payment, foreign-exchange and post-trade use cases simultaneously.
The presence of the Japanese yen among the active test currencies, without a Japanese bank yet named as a participant, is worth watching. It suggests the sandbox architecture is already accommodating JPY flows, which could anticipate a Japanese institution joining in a subsequent wave. For operators tracking the build-out of bank-grade tokenised deposit rails, CBMT’s trajectory from a German domestic project to an eight-bank, multi-currency, multi-region sandbox within a relatively short period indicates that momentum is accelerating rather than stalling.