BOJ CBDC Pilot Hits 50,000 TPS, Raises Single-Account Capacity to 6,000

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) has made significant progress in its central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot program, successfully processing a mixed workload of 50,000 transactions per second. This achievement is a crucial step towards developing a digital yen that can efficiently handle high-volume retail payments.

In one test, the system reached 6,000 transactions per second for a single account, indicating that merchants could process thousands of payments instantly. However, the BOJ found that sudden transaction spikes produced significant increases in latency and that database configuration, tuning, and controls on incoming requests would become essential under heavier loads.

The central bank also modeled a hypothetical 500,000 transactions per second workload, which would require scaling application servers, database servers, and network capacity. This scenario implies massive scaling could reshape Japan's payment infrastructure costs.

Despite the technical progress, the BOJ has not decided whether to issue a CBDC in Japan. The central bank will continue examining the ledger-management infrastructure at the core of the proposed system while holding further discussions with private businesses through the CBDC Forum.