Brazil's central bank has picked 16 proposals - from firms including Nubank, Microsoft, Visa and SETL - for the pilot phase of its Drex CBDC project. Brazil has been working on a digital real project for several years ahead of a planned 2024 launch. Last week, the central bank gave the currency a name - Drex. Now it is gearing up for the first pilot phase, which will test privacy and programmability functionalities through the implementation of a specific use case - a delivery versus payment (DvP) protocol for a federal government bond between customers from different institutions, in addition to the services that make up this transaction. The bank says that this use case allows testing to focus on privacy, as it promotes the exchange of information between the various platform participants, and also tests the programmability of the offered services and their interoperability. Propsals from financial institutions, payment institutions, cooperatives, public banks, crypto asset service developers, financial market infrastructure operators and payment arrangement instituters have all been given the greenlight. Among them is a consortium of Banco Bradesco, interbank clearing house Nuclea, and blockchain outfit SETL. Another proposal comes from Nubank, while Microsoft is involved in three efforts and Visa is working with XP.