Explore the future of public money with rigorous, neutral technical depth
OpenZeppelin contributes open standards, prototypes, and independent security review to central bank research on tokenization, programmability, and settlement in central bank money, so each experiment produces evidence you can stand behind.
Trusted by leading financial institutions and blockchain protocols
Experiments in public money have to be designed for scrutiny from day one
- 91%
- of central banks exploring a CBDC
- 43%
- stepped up wholesale CBDC work due to stablecoins
- 8
- central banks in the BIS Project Agorá prototype
Sources: BIS Papers No 159 (2025); BIS Annual Economic Report 2026.
Wholesale settlement, tokenized reserves, and cross-border experiments are moving from research papers into multi-institution pilots. Each one has to answer questions beyond technical feasibility: whether the design preserves oversight and monetary autonomy, whether privacy and finality hold under adversarial conditions, and whether the findings are sound enough to inform policy. The technology choices made in a proof of concept often shape what follows it, so standards and security thinking belongs in the first design session.
Get the foundations right, and every experiment produces evidence policy can rely on.
Ledger architecture, the token standard, the privacy model, and participant access tiers are chosen at proof-of-concept stage. They tend to persist into later phases, which makes them the most consequential decisions to get right.
Pilots are often assembled quickly by multi-party teams, on bespoke token designs and code that has yet to be security-reviewed. Findings drawn from them are hard to reproduce or compare across jurisdictions, and can mislead when they feed into public reports. Open, widely reviewed standards make findings portable.
Wholesale and cross-border designs connect central banks, commercial banks, and private technology providers, each with its own keys, systems, and legal regime. The security of the arrangement depends on every interface between them.
As private stablecoins and tokenized markets grow alongside public experiments, oversight teams need the technical capacity to assess how onchain money behaves under stress, in the systems they oversee as well as the systems they design.
Where OpenZeppelin contributes to public money research
From open standards and prototypes to cross-border pilots and supervisory capability, here is where OpenZeppelin supports central bank work.
- Open Standards & Reference Implementations
Start every experiment from widely reviewed foundations
- OpenZeppelin Contracts are open source and reviewed in public across the industry. Our applied research team develops reference implementations and prototypes for novel settlement, privacy, and interoperability designs on those standards, published openly where appropriate so findings serve the wider public-sector community.
- Wholesale Settlement & Tokenized Reserves
Explore settlement in central bank money on secure foundations
- We develop and review the token, settlement, and access-control logic of wholesale settlement experiments, including their interaction with tokenized deposits and securities, so pilot results reflect the design being tested and its implementation holds up.
- Cross-Border Interoperability
Connect currencies and jurisdictions while each keeps control
- Cross-border designs have to balance each central bank's autonomy and oversight with efficient settlement between institutions. We threat-model the interoperability layer, messaging, and FX mechanisms. Project Mariana, the BIS Innovation Hub's cross-border wholesale experiment with Banque de France, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Swiss National Bank, based its token design on the OpenZeppelin ERC-20 standard.
- Privacy & Programmability Design
Balance confidentiality, auditability, and control by design
- OpenZeppelin co-authored ERC-7984, the confidential token standard developed with Zama. We review cryptographic designs, zero-knowledge systems, and programmability features, so confidentiality for participants, visibility for the central bank, and control over monetary operations hold as intended.
- Supervisory Technical Capability
Equip oversight teams to assess onchain systems
- Training and enablement for supervisory and payments-oversight staff on how smart contract, key-management, and bridge risk works in practice, drawn from 900+ security engagements, so your teams can assess the stablecoins and tokenized systems within your remit.
Across all of the above
Independent Technical Assessment- Before a pilot concludes or a design moves to its next phase, a Technical Risk Assessment gives your teams independent analysis of the architecture, code, and dependencies, documented to the standard public reporting requires.
“Bringing regulated funds onchain means security and compliance have to be inseparable, and they have to hold across every environment we build on. OpenZeppelin has been a continuous partner from architecture through deployment, across both our Ethereum and Solana work, and this consistency and rigor allows us to advance WisdomTree’s tokenization roadmap confidently, at scale.”
“Huge thanks to OpenZeppelin for being a great partner during the security audit — their expertise and constant support were invaluable for the entire engagement.”
From research question to published findings
Central bank experimentation runs in phases: research, design, pilot, and review. Each phase carries its own risk, and the findings of each shape the next. OpenZeppelin researchers and engineers contribute across all four, scaled by OpenZeppelin AI and calibrated to the scope, participants, and public-reporting needs of each project.
Validate the design before code is written
- Architecture Review
- Threat Modeling
- Standards & Regulatory Review
- Governance Design
- Cryptographic Design Review
- Applied Research
Reach production with secure foundations
- Blockchain Library Development
- Custom Platform & Solution Development
- Reference Implementations
- Standards Development
Catch vulnerabilities across code, infrastructure, and operations
- Smart Contract Security Audit
- Blockchain Infrastructure Audit
- Zero-Knowledge Proof Audit
- Technical Risk Assessment (TRA)
- Penetration Testing
- Operational Security Assessment
- Deployment Verification
Keep production systems secure over time
- Continuous Support & Maintenance
- Dedicated Blockchain Architect
- Custom Monitoring Solution
- Security Training & Enablement
Engagements scoped to research programs
We scope work around your research agenda, from a single design review to a multi-phase program spanning several pilots, structured to meet public-sector procurement and confidentiality requirements.
The open standards behind today's onchain money
Onchain money already concentrates on open standards. The libraries behind 9 of the top 10 stablecoins and 10 of the top 10 tokenized money market funds by market cap are OpenZeppelin Contracts, open source and reviewed in public: the assets central banks increasingly need to understand, and the standards public money experiments can start from.
Every engagement pairs OpenZeppelin researchers and engineers with OpenZeppelin AI, with risk assessment and monitoring running throughout, so issues surface early, while they are still cheap to fix.
9 of the top 10 stablecoins
by market cap build on OpenZeppelin Contracts
10 of the top 10 tokenized money market funds
by market cap build on OpenZeppelin Contracts
