The discussions will touch on a variety of topics, including business and technological features of retail payments using the central bank’s digital currency. BOJ noted that the decision on whether Japan will issue a digital yen will have to be made by the country’s government.
However, many major Japanese companies have already been included in the list of firms selected to participate in the discussions. In addition to banks, the group includes Sony, store operator Lawson, the finance arm of automobile giant Toyota, and East Japan Railway.
BOJ said in May that after the successful completion of the second phase of the digital yen pilot project, the authority had decided to continue the program. The experiment used a model consisting of 100,000 hypothetical users and five intermediaries to test a workload of 500 to 3,000 transactions per second.
In March, it was announced that Tokyo Kiraboshi Financial Group, Minna Bank and Shikoku Bank would take part in testing stablecoins on the Japan Open Chain blockchain. The first phase of testing consists of coin issuance and transactions within banks.