Alp Gasimov
2 min read
Interchain Labs announced it is collaborating with a consortium of major banks and the Colombian government to pilot the country’s first central-bank digital currency (CBDC) on the Cosmos network, using IBC Eureka as its primary transfer protocol.
The initiative seeks to modernize cross-border settlements by leveraging the efficiency of programmable money without compromising institutional security.
A CBDC is a digital form of a country’s sovereign money, issued and regulated by its central bank. it carries the same legal status as cash while enabling programmable features typically found in digital payments. Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, a CBDC represents an electronic liability of the central bank and is backed by the full faith and credit of the issuing authority.
“When you’re the Colombian government, there is no way you’re trusting anyone except for yourself,” said Maghnus Mareneck, chief executive officer of Interchain Labs. “To you, crypto is so scary. Imagine you’re a president and you suffer a hack — you’re going to take the blame. So having technology they can understand and change is the most important thing in terms of the security assumptions.”
Mareneck noted that this mirrors the strategy of real-world asset issuers such as Ondo Finance — which has onboarded investors including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock — in building dedicated Cosmos chains. These issuers configure their own validator parameters so transfers occur only under preapproved conditions.
“IBC Eureka only rests upon the trust assumptions of your blockchain,” Mareneck noted. “If your blockchain has validators that are all institutions you trust, then you don’t have to trust anyone else except the people that you’re sending assets to.”
The pilot allows Colombia’s central bank and partner banks to define and modify their list of trusted validators, effectively creating a permissioned CBDC rail atop a public network. By starting with a controlled set of participants — and adding new ones only as confidence grows — the project aims to demonstrate that programmable money can deliver faster, more transparent settlements without sacrificing institutional security.
