Fortune 500 company Accenture has teamed up with Digital Dollar Foundation to conduct Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, trials in the United States. Announced on Monday, May 3, the newly formed Digital Dollar Project will carry out five CBDC pilot programs over the next 12 months. The project’s objective is to generate data to inform U.S. policymakers on how to develop a domestic digital currency. The Digital Dollar Project will launch three pilot programs in the next two months, generating data on the functional, sociological, and business benefits of a digital greenback. Al Jazeera reports that former chair of …

While key central bank figures in the West like Jerome Powell and Christine Lagarde appear to be procrastinating on the subject of central bank digital currencies, China continues to make significant progress. China’s digital currency electronic payment project, or DCEP, helmed by the country’s central bank, continues to draw significant private sector participation. From tech giants, to e-commerce conglomerates, many of the major private sector firms are playing pivotal roles in the quest to create the digital yuan. DCEP testing also continues to expand, with trial runs via lotteries taking place across several cities. Banks like the Agricultural Bank and …

The United Kingdom’s central bank, the Bank of England, or BoE, still maintains that it is unsure on a path forward regarding a central bank digital currency, although the entity is looking to hire at least seven CBDC-related job positions. The job listings recently surfaced on the BoE’s job posting website. One such position searches for a “Stakeholder Analyst - Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).” As per the site, the bank is also searching for a project analyst, a solution architect, a technology analyst, a senior manager, and a senior enterprise architect — all CBDC-related, as well as a senior …

This weekly roundup of news from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong attempts to curate the industry’s most important news, including influential projects, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations. Huobi Asset Management is looking to be the Grayscale of Asia with the launch of four cryptocurrency-related tracker funds. The funds include a Bitcoin Fund, an Ethereum fund, a multi-asset basket of digital currencies, and a private equity fund for mining businesses. The aim is clearly to entice major institutional investors into the space with a product that feels familiar. The fund and asset management company is set …

Major Chinese technology and commerce firms are starting to open up regarding their involvement in developing the digital yuan. Ant Group and Tencent Holdings revealed the extent of their collaboration with the People’s Bank of China in developing the digital yuan at the Digital China Summit, an annual trade fair in the city of Fuzhou in southeastern Fujian province. According to the South China Morning Post, Ant Group started working with the PBoC on the digital yuan in 2017, years before China officially debuted digital currency pilots in 2020. In June 2019, China’s digital currency institute reportedly used Ant’s mobile …

The demand for cryptocurrency exceeded PayPal’s initial expectations after the firm launched crypto trading in late 2020, according to the company’s CEO. “Demand on the crypto side has been multiple-fold to what we initially expected. There’s a lot of excitement,” PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman said in a Sunday interview with Time magazine. Schulman said that existing financial infrastructure needs modernization because it’s “inefficient today” due to overly expensive, slow international transactions. The CEO predicted that the financial system is poised to see more changes in the next five to 10 years than it has experienced over the past …

JD.com has been using China’s Digital Currency Electronic Payment, or DCEP, system to pay the salaries of some employees since January. The e-commerce firm revealed the news on Sunday while announcing its participation in the one-year DCEP trial show at the fourth Digital China Summit in Fuzhou slated for Sunday and Monday. Commenting on its digital yuan adoption journey, the company stated that apart from paying staff salaries, JD has also utilized the DCEP in business-to-business payments to partner firms as well as cross-bank settlements. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, JD Technology and Digital Currency Research Institute — the company’s …

Ethereum software company ConsenSys has formed a technical partnership with Kakao’s Klaytn blockchain, with a goal to develop a private platform for the issuance of a South Korean central bank digital currency, or CBDC. Klaytn is a public blockchain developed by Ground X, a blockchain affiliate of the South Korean internet company Kakao. Best known for its Kakao Talk mobile messaging app, Kakao has since branched out into the shopping and travel industries, among others. In 2019, the company commenced work on the Klaytn blockchain, which by the time of publication has the 25th-largest market capitalization in the cryptocurrency space. …

Some of China’s largest state banks are actively promoting the digital yuan as a superior means of payment to the country’s two leading payment providers, Alipay and WeChat Pay. In a Monday report, Reuters revealed that six of China’s largest banks are promoting China’s nascent central bank-issued digital currency, or CBDC, in Shanghai ahead of an online shopping festival on May 5. The banks are urging retail outlets and consumers to download the digital wallet and make purchases using the CBDC, also known as e-CNY. This would bypass the current payment methods of choice for millions of shoppers, Ant Group’s …

As central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, continue to garner mainstream traction across the global financial landscape in recent years, almost all central banks are actively researching the benefits and risks of offering a digital currency to the public. In its most basic sense, a CBDC is a digital form of fiat money, backed by a suitable amount of monetary reserves like gold or foreign currency reserves. Each CBDC unit acts as a secure digital instrument equivalent and can be used as a way of payment, a store of value and an official unit of account. What distinguishes them from …

The virtual 7th Asia-Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum was jointly hosted by the Ministry of the Environment of Japan and the Asia Pacific Adaptation Network with the theme “Enabling Resilience for All: The Critical Decade to Scale-up Action.” The forum took place in March and was held to formulate national adaptation planning for science and technology, and energy and fiscal policies that consider the interlinkages between climate change, health and biodiversity. These nature- and ecosystem-based policies will serve as the basis for the Asia-Pacific region’s contributions to the Leaders Summit on Climate in the United States; the United Nations Biodiversity …

The Norwegian central bank, Norges Bank, is set to test various technical solutions for a central bank digital currency following years of research. Norges Bank officially announced Friday that it will be conducting CBDC tests over the next two years upon recommendations from an internal working group. “The working group is of the opinion that the motivation for research into CBDCs has been strengthened. Many central banks are in the process of carrying out similar research, and several are already under way with technical testing,” the central bank stated. According to the announcement, Norges Bank has been involved in CBDC …