SDG alignment¶
DPG Standard, indicator 1 — Relevance to the Sustainable Development Goals.
CBWeb3 is public infrastructure for wholesale cross-border settlement between central banks and commercial banks in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its contribution to the 2030 Agenda is therefore indirect but specific: it attacks the cost, speed and counterparty risk of the correspondent-banking layer that sits underneath every cross-border payment in the region, and it does so as an open, co-governed common rather than as a proprietary product.
The causal chain is stated plainly so it can be judged: CBWeb3 does not itself lower the price a migrant pays to send money home. It lowers the cost and settlement risk borne by the institutions that intermediate that payment, and it removes the licensing and vendor-dependency cost of the infrastructure itself for any central bank in the region that adopts it.
Primary targets¶
Target 10.c — reduce remittance transaction costs¶
Reduce to less than 3 per cent the transaction costs of migrant remittances and eliminate remittance corridors with costs higher than 5 per cent. (Indicator 10.c.1)
Remittance pricing in the region is driven substantially by correspondent banking: prefunded nostro/vostro accounts, multi-day settlement, FX spreads and the credit risk of non-simultaneous exchange. CBWeb3's Enhanced Correspondent Banking flow settles both legs of a currency exchange atomically through Hash Time-Lock Contracts across two sovereign networks — neither side can take the other's funds without releasing its own. Eliminating principal risk and the prefunding it forces is a direct input to the cost base that 10.c.1 measures.
Target 8.10 — strengthen domestic financial institutions¶
Strengthen the capacity of domestic financial institutions to encourage and expand access to banking, insurance and financial services for all.
Smaller central banks and commercial banks in the region cannot individually fund the design, security review and operation of tokenized settlement infrastructure. CBWeb3 supplies that capacity as a shared, openly licensed reference implementation with public documentation, conformance test vectors and a sandbox, so that the capability does not depend on the size of the institution's technology budget.
Target 9.1 — resilient, sustainable regional infrastructure¶
Develop quality, reliable, sustainable and resilient infrastructure … to support economic development and human well-being, with a focus on affordable and equitable access for all.
The hub-and-spoke topology is deliberately non-extractive: each country operates its own domestic network and retains sovereignty over its own ledger and monetary policy, while interoperating through a shared settlement layer. There is no central operator able to charge rent, exclude a participant, or discontinue the system. The networks are gasless Hyperledger Besu QBFT chains, so participation carries no per-transaction fee and no proof-of-work energy cost.
Target 17.6 and 17.16 — cooperation and multi-stakeholder partnership¶
Enhance … cooperation on and access to science, technology and innovation … / Enhance the global partnership for sustainable development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships.
CBWeb3 is built by exactly such a partnership: IDB Lab as sponsor, LNet as infrastructure coordinator, CEMLA and FLAR as regional monetary and financial advisers, central banks as participants, and LF Decentralized Trust as the neutral open-source host. The working group is open to any individual or organisation, its decisions are taken in public on GitHub, and every technical artifact — design documents, contracts, test vectors, research papers — is published under an open licence as it is produced.
Secondary contributions¶
| Target | How CBWeb3 relates to it |
|---|---|
| 8.3 — formalisation and growth of MSMEs | Cheaper, faster cross-border settlement lowers a fixed cost that falls hardest on small exporters and importers. |
| 9.3 — access of small enterprises to financial services | Same mechanism, from the access rather than the cost side. |
| 16.6 — effective, accountable, transparent institutions | Settlement is recorded on an auditable ledger; supervisory access is role-separated and every privileged action is logged. See Do no harm. |
| 17.9 — capacity building | Public manuals, a conformance suite and a sandbox exist so institutions can build competence without a vendor engagement. |
Honest limits¶
- CBWeb3 is a test network. No SDG outcome has been measured, because no live economic activity runs on it. What can be evidenced today is the openness and reusability of the infrastructure, not its realised impact.
- The link to target 10.c is structural, not attributable: a fall in remittance prices would depend on the pricing decisions of the institutions using the rails, not on the rails alone.
- Retail financial inclusion is explicitly out of scope. CBWeb3 serves institutions; it is not a consumer wallet and does not reach end users directly.