Sweden’s Riksbank starts DLT-based e-krona pilot

On February 20, 2020, Sveriges Riksbank said it was working with Accenture on a technical pilot for an e-krona, moving Sweden’s central-bank digital-currency work from policy study toward a functioning test environment. The proposed digital krona was designed as a complement to cash and as central-bank money available to the public, but the Riksbank stressed that Sweden had not decided to issue it.

The distinction mattered. The pilot applied distributed-ledger and token concepts associated with cryptocurrency to sovereign money, while retaining central control over issuance, access and network governance. It was therefore neither a new cryptocurrency offered to investors nor a public launch. It was an institutional experiment in how digital state money could operate as cash use declined.

What the pilot was built to test

The February 2020 project document described a private network based on R3’s Corda distributed-ledger platform. Only the Riksbank would approve network participants and create or redeem e-kronor. Approved intermediaries, such as banks, would obtain e-kronor against reserves in the Riksbank’s RIX settlement system and distribute them to end users in a two-tier model.

Within the isolated environment, simulated consumers and merchants were to hold tokens in digital wallets, transfer them, and make deposits, withdrawals and payments through a mobile application. Cards and wearables such as smart watches were also in scope. The design called for continuous availability and instant payments, while the pilot would examine whether offline use might be possible.

The architecture separated ordinary e-krona payments from RIX: transfers inside the e-krona network would occur among approved nodes, while issuance and redemption would connect back to central-bank reserves through RIX. A notary component was intended to prevent double spending. This made the system structurally different from Bitcoin’s open, permissionless network and energy-intensive proof-of-work process.

Why Sweden’s test mattered

The Riksbank’s stated problem was not a shortage of digital payment options. Swedish consumers already had commercial-bank money and private electronic payment services. The policy issue was that cash was the only central-bank liability directly available to the public, and its use had fallen sharply over the preceding decade. If cash became marginal, access to public money could narrow while dependence on private payment infrastructure increased.

The pilot converted that concern into a concrete systems test. For the blockchain sector, it showed that a major central bank was willing to evaluate tokenized value and distributed records, but only inside a permissioned architecture with identifiable institutions and central governance. For banks and payment companies, the two-tier model suggested that a retail digital currency need not eliminate intermediaries; they could remain responsible for distribution and customer-facing wallets.

The development did not establish demand, adoption, transaction capacity or economic impact. No e-kronor were released to the public, no issuance amount was announced, and the simulated environment could not demonstrate production resilience. There is also no verified basis in the cited records to attribute any cryptocurrency price movement on February 20, 2020, to the announcement.

What was not decided

The pilot was scheduled to run through February 28, 2021, with an option for further development. The Riksbank explicitly left open whether an e-krona would be issued, what final design it would use and which technology would support it. The February project paper also said a production system would require a new supplier procurement. Those qualifications made the event a research milestone, not monetary issuance or legal-tender approval.

Later context

A Riksbank phase-one report published on April 6, 2021, said the tested technology created useful possibilities but remained untried at the scale and security level required for retail central-bank money. That later assessment confirms the experimental nature of the February 20, 2020, announcement; it does not change what had been decided on that date.