National Bank of Moldova to host first New Technology for Old Markets conference in Chisinau with National Bank of Romania and Banque de France

The National Bank of Moldova published an IPN interview with Vice Governor Mihnea Constantinescu ahead of the first staging in Chisinau of the international conference “New Technology for Old Markets”, organised with the National Bank of Romania and Banque de France. The interview frames the event as a forum on how new financial technologies could reshape emerging-market financial systems, pointing to Moldova’s experience with the MIA instant payments solution as an example of how targeted infrastructure changes can reduce fragmentation, transfer costs and processing time. The conference agenda focuses on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and blockchain-based distributed databases, smart contracts and potential Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) architectures, with discussion of how these tools could reconfigure market infrastructure across payments and capital markets. Constantinescu also highlighted the role of central banks in balancing innovation and stability through tools such as regulatory sandboxes and cross-border coordination to reduce regulatory arbitrage, and argued that digital-market risks require more real-time monitoring than traditional reporting cycles. Examples cited include the Swiss National Bank’s Project Helvetia Phase III, which issued a CHF 200 million digital bond settled in wholesale CBDC on SIX’s digital exchange DLT platform, and Project Venus, which tested bond issuance and CBDC settlement on a single DLT infrastructure; Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau will deliver a keynote on the “unified ledger” concept.