CBDC research has been announced as a top priority for the Bank for International Settlements’ Innovation Hub, or BISIH, in 2021. According to its annual work program, BISIH, plans to “explore the feasibility of faster and cheaper cross-border payments” using central bank digital currencies. BISIH also stated it will explore prototypes of “tiered retail CBDC distribution architectures” and distributed ledgers to issue “tokenized green bonds to retail investors.” The BIS initiatives will be driven by the Innovation Hub Centres in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Switzerland — which have been established in conjunction with local central banks. The BISIH center in …

Despite rapid advancement of a digital yuan, China's progress in internationalizing its currency has stalled out in recent months. Per data from SWIFT's RMB Tracker released on Jan. 20, the Chinese yuan (CNY), also known as the Renminbi (RMB) had gained only .02% in international usage between December 2018 and last month. Meanwhile, it had fallen from 1.26% to 1.16% between November and December of 2020. While not a catastrophe, it's nowhere near the numbers that China has become used to since making the internationalization of the RMB a priority in 2009. An August report on the project from the …

Residents of the Longhua District in the Chinese city of Shenzhen will have a chance to participate in a forthcoming lottery event that aims to encourage the adoption of the country's new central bank digital currency — known alternatively as the DC/EP, digital renminbi, or digital yuan. Announced on Jan. 20, the lottery is scheduled for Jan. 26, when lots will be drawn to select the 100,000 winners who will each receive a festive "red envelope" packet containing 200 yuan ($31) in DC/EP. The total currency issued and distributed for the event will therefore amount to 20 million yuan ($3.1 …

Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs, were the talk of the town for many in crypto and banking in 2020, with Sweden's prospective e-krona one of the frontrunners. Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank, is investigating distributed ledger technology, or DLT, for its CBDC proof-of-concept, the bank’s deputy governor confirmed today. “The technology we use is the DLT called Corda,” Cecilia Skingsley, the deputy governor of Sweden’s central bank, said on Wednesday during a CfC St. Moritz conference panel. She did, however, decline to turn the announcement into a full-bore advertisement for Corda: “The reason we use Corda is not that …

Central bank digital currencies gained traction all over the world in 2020, as all the world's biggest economies considered producing their own digital money. But how will CBDCs affect Bitcoin (BTC) if every country comes out with its own? Dean Steinbeck, co-founder and chief operating officer of Horizen Labs, posited that Bitcoin’s core atmosphere would remain the same on the surface. “There has recently been plenty of activity internationally with governments exploring the development of native virtual assets,” Steinbeck told Cointelegraph. Steinbeck also works as general counsel at Horizen. “A healthy, robust virtual assets ecosystem has the potential for broader …

The Bank of France successfully piloted a central bank digital currency — or CBDC — experiment in December, using the technology to settle monetary fund shares on a private blockchain platform for the first time. As announced by Le Banque de France on Jan. 19, the pilot commenced on Dec. 17, and saw 2 million euros ($2.4 million) worth of simulated shares purchased and sold by investors using a CBDC. The pilot took place with distributed ledger technology provided by SETL — a UK-based regulated blockchain services provider, which also provided the CBDC stablecoin. SETL’s IZNEZ record-keeping platform was used …

Over the course of 2020, numerous countries across the globe raced toward their own digital versions of their currencies, known as central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. The crypto industry still has its selling points, however, even if most countries launched CBDCs, according to Jake Yocom-Piatt, co-founder of crypto project Decred. “I expect many nation states will create their own CBDCs in the not-so-distant future, but there is a key differentiator between CBDCs and cryptocurrencies,” Yocom-Piatt told Cointelegraph. “Cryptocurrencies, e.g. Bitcoin and Decred, are fundamentally fairer systems than fiat currencies, so while CBDCs may adopt many cryptocurrency features, they cannot …

The COVID-19 crisis has done little to dampen China’s interest in becoming the first major economy to distribute a central bank digital currency. Quite the contrary, its digital currency/electronic payment project appears to be picking up speed. In the Shenzhen region, for example, 100,000 local citizens this month received for free a total of $31 million digital yuan via lottery, and now residents can use ATMs to convert digital yuan to cash on a test basis. Meanwhile, the Postal Savings Bank of China has reportedly developed physical wallet cards on which to store digital yuan, something useful for the elderly …

The Chinese national blockchain project, the Blockchain Service Network, is planning to pilot integration with global central bank digital currencies. According to a Jan. 15 blog post, the BSN is looking to build a universal digital payment network, or UDPN, based on CBDCs of various countries as part of its 2021 roadmap. Currently at the design stage, the beta version of UDPN is expected to launch in the second half of 2021. The BSN plans to complete the UDPN development in five years. With the UDPN, BSN aims to enable a standardized digital currency transfer method and payment procedure. The …

Cryptocurrency stablecoins could become systemically important overnight, says United States Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, and that’s why the Fed is determined to get its own central bank digital currency right. CBDCs are the banking industry’s answer to cryptocurrency stablecoins. While they are often hosted on the blockchain, they share little in the way of philosophical parity with their decentralized counterparts. CBDCs will be overseen by the banks that issue them and will be regulated under the laws of their respective jurisdictions. Speaking in an interview with Yahoo Finance, Powell said advances in technology had enabled private entities to create …

Russia’s central bank digital currency, or CBDC, could contain a number of risks related to cybersecurity and fraud, according to several local financial institutions. The Association of Russian Banks, or ARB, has released its official feedback on Russia’s digital ruble project on Jan. 13. The study included 17 ABR credit institutions in Russia accounting for 58% of the total assets of the domestic banking system. According to the report, the majority of ARB members believe that risks associated with the digital ruble are similar to those of cashless transactions powered by banking accounts and cards, as well as cryptocurrencies. The …

Central bank digital currencies have been an integral part of progressive discussions within the cryptocurrency community. CBDCs are virtual representations of the fiat currency of a particular country. They are often based on blockchain technology and are issued and regulated by the official monetary organization of the country. The feature that makes them different from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) is that CBDCs are backed by the central bank’s deposits of the country’s currency and are regulated by the central bank, while cryptocurrencies are not. Cointelegraph discussed with Thomas Trépanier, director of business development for Roxe at Apifiny …