Open standards and best practices¶
DPG Standard, indicator 8 — adherence to open standards and recognised best practices.
Standards implemented¶
| Domain | Standard | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Ledger protocol | Ethereum execution semantics and JSON-RPC API | Hyperledger Besu spokes and hub; the interface any client uses to read the chain |
| Consensus | QBFT (IBFT 2.0 family), a permissioned BFT algorithm | Every spoke and the hub, gasless |
| Tokens | ERC-20 | FiatCentralBankMoney (tCeBM) and the AMM pool contracts |
| Contract interfaces | Solidity ABI, EVM bytecode | Published ABIs and generated contract documentation |
| Cryptography | secp256k1 ECDSA, Keccak-256; EC prime256v1 for TLS/PKI |
Signing, addressing, certificates |
| Confidential transactions | Zero-knowledge proofs (Zeto) and notarised transfers (Noto), Hyperledger Paladin domains | Inter-institutional value transfer |
| Atomic settlement | Hash Time-Lock Contracts | Cross-spoke payment-versus-payment |
| Web APIs | OpenAPI 3.0.3, HTTP/1.1, JSON | Both scenario gateways and the Toolbox contracts |
| Identity and sessions | OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0, JWT (RFC 7519) | Keycloak, gateway authorisation |
| Credentials | X.509 certificates from PKCS#10 signing requests | Participant onboarding |
| Data serialisation | JSON, YAML, JSON Schema, Protocol Buffers enums | APIs, configuration, Toolbox artifacts |
| Persistence | SQL (PostgreSQL) | Service state, exportable with standard tooling |
| Packaging | OCI container images, Docker Compose | Deployment |
| Licensing metadata | SPDX identifiers | Every first-party source file |
Financial-messaging standardisation — ISO 20022 — is a stated direction for future integration with existing payment systems, not a claim about the current implementation. It is discussed in the Technical Blueprint and is not implemented today.
Engineering practice¶
Version control and provenance. All work is in public Git. Every commit carries a
Developer Certificate of Origin Signed-off-by line. Where a change was produced with AI
assistance, the commit records it in an Assisted-by: trailer, following LF Decentralized
Trust's draft AI guidelines — see
AGENTS.md.
When the platform was brought into this repository, its full 1,391-commit history was
imported with paths rewritten so that git log and git blame remain usable, rather than
squashed into a single import commit.
Releases. Semantic Versioning for interface contracts and
releases, with a Keep a Changelog-format
CHANGELOG.md.
Continuous integration. Every pull request runs the repository's gates: Toolbox CI (contract linting with Spectral, JSON Schema validation of mocks and vectors, conformance tests, artifact-path validation), a documentation build, and a repository-wide secret scan over both the working tree and the full history. The platform carries its own backend, contract and license-header workflows. The gates are written to fail on the defects they exist to catch — they are periodically tested against deliberately planted defects, because a gate that has never failed is not known to work.
Testing. Go unit and integration suites across the backend services; Foundry unit, fuzz and invariant tests for the smart contracts; a conformance suite and published test vectors in the Toolbox so that third-party implementations can be checked against the same expectations; k6 load suites for performance baselines.
Security practice. Static analysis of contracts with Slither; dependency updates via Dependabot; enforced license headers; secret scanning; a published security policy with private vulnerability reporting, stated response targets and coordinated disclosure.
Documentation practice. Architecture Decision Records for design decisions with their
rationale; an authoritative single-source toolchain file that the build enforces rather
than merely describes; user manuals per portal; and a published documentation site built
from the repository on every change to main.
Principles¶
CBWeb3 is built to the Principles for Digital Development — in particular design for scale (a hub-and-spoke topology that admits new countries without redesign), use open standards, open data, open source and open innovation (everything above), reuse and improve (the system is assembled from existing Hyperledger projects rather than rebuilt), build for sustainability (co-governed in a neutral foundation, not dependent on a single vendor or funder), and be collaborative (an open working group with public decisions).
It also follows the direction of the BIS and CPMI work on wholesale CBDC and cross-border payments — atomic payment-versus-payment to remove principal risk, sovereignty of each domestic ledger, and interoperability without a shared global ledger — which is the design's stated rationale in the Technical Blueprint.