The president of Banco Central — Brazil’s central bank — has announced Brazilians could expect to see a central bank digital currency before 2023. According to a Sept. 2 report from news outlet Correio Braziliense, Brazil could be ready for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) in 2022. Roberto Campos Neto, the president of Banco Central, stated that the country’s central bank had already undertaken measures to modernize the Brazilian financial system which has made a CBDC the natural outcome. The president cited the country’s PIX instant payment system and open banking among those measures. The central bank plans to …

The MIT Digital Currency Initiative, or DCI, is helping the federal reserve bank of Boston build a digital currency with the goal of scaling for consumer use. The DCI’s director Neha Narula told Cointelegraph: “We're trying to build a high throughput, low latency transaction system that could be used by consumers and could handle the security and resilience required for a national currency.” The multi-year collaboration between the two organizations is still in very early stages and not much information is being released to the public. Yet the focus is not on building a newer version of interbank digital ledger, …

Two nations, two visions of the financial future: "The tech cold war is here — and the US isn't winning," wrote Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen in an opinion piece for The Hill recently. According to him, China has “a once-in-a-century opportunity to wrest away American stewardship of the global financial system, including its ultimate goal of replacing the dollar with a digital yuan." Western values of openness and freedom could be lost in this new financial order. Others have sounded similar concerns. “There is a new space race. It is the cyberspace race of building and controlling the systems and …

Eswar Prasad, a professor of Trade Policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes that even though China’s digital yuan will enhance the renminbi’s role as an international payment currency, it will “hardly put a dent” in the US dollar’s status as the dominant currency. In an opinion piece published in Project Syndicate, Prasad states that the Chinese government should keep reforming the country’s financial markets and remove restrictions on capital flow to put both China’s CBDC and national cross-border payments system in the global sphere to strengthen its adoption. According to the professor, the …

The Central bank of Brazil — or Banco Central do Brazil — is laying the groundwork for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) with an official statement revealing it has already formed a dedicated group to study the crypto industry. According to the central bank, the team consists of 12 members in an intergovernmental group that will assess how the CBDC could fit with the national payments ecosystem and what its impact could be on the economy and the society. Previous reports detailed that Brazil spends around 90 billion reals ($16 billion) annually to guarantee a functional supply of paper …

The People’s Bank of China is planning to put its digital currency to use at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. According to a Reuters report, Sun Guofeng, the head of the monetary policy department at PBoC, said that the bank does not have a timetable for the rollout of the digital currency. However, going by Sun’s statement, PBoC is likely to launch it before the 2022 Winter Olympic Games as they plan to use it during the international sports event. The news comes as China is ramping up pilots for the digital yuan. At present, the Chinese central …

The United States is losing the "technological cold war" to China due to its tough regulatory approach to blockchain and cryptocurrency-related companies, a senior executive at Ripple believes. In an opinion article for The Hill on Aug. 21, Chris Larsen, co-founder and chairman at major crypto payments firm Ripple, said that China’s digital currency leadership is a “once-in-a-century opportunity” to replace the U.S. dollar with the digital yuan as the world’s reserve currency. Larsen set out the main reasons for China winning the U.S. in the ongoing technological struggle. Namely, China has “already achieved near universal use of digital payments” …

China’s nationwide blockchain project, the Blockchain Service Network, or BSN, will be integrating stablecoin support in 2021. Yifan He, CEO of Red Date Technology, a major tech company involved in the BSN development, told Cointelegraph that the project will soon start integrating stablecoins. Piloted in late 2019, China’s BSN is a state-backed initiative that intends to support medium-sized businesses in building and deploying blockchain applications. The exec explained that stablecoins will be used as payment for various services on the BSN ecosystem, including cloud resources. “Only stablecoins can make it much easier, quicker and safer,” the executive noted. Stablecoins will …

The nation of Qatar is a World Bank “high-income economy,” backed by the world's third-largest natural gas and oil reserves. It has the third-highest GDP per capita in the world (by purchasing power parity), with very high human development. Similar to other Gulf Cooperation Council states — which also include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain — Qatar has had to deal with the decline in global oil and gas prices after they first collapsed in 2014, and the situation has been made even more difficult by a Saudi-led embargo of the nation that started in …

Central bank digital currencies are a digital representation of a country’s fiat currency. They are effectively a government-issued cryptocurrency designed to replace the traditional, physical form of fiat currencies. The term CBDC is broad because its implementation involves several critical decisions on the part of an issuing central bank. The primary decision is whether a CBDC should be a general-purpose in that it’s available to be used by the general population. If not, then the issuing authority may decide to make it available for “wholesale” transactions, which means the CBDC is only used for settlements between banks. Finally, a CBDC …

The former governor of Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, said that private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Facebook’s Libra may have a future even when central banks roll out their own digital currencies. Rajan, who was also the Chief Economist and Research Director at the International Monetary Fund from 2003–2006, said during a CNBC podcast that one of these digital currencies might only become problematic if it were to hold a monopoly. However, he believes that there will be other private digital currencies that will play different roles and provide strong competition to existing ones. The former central banker …

XRP, the world’s third largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, is not competing with national digital currencies like the forthcoming digital yuan, according to a senior executive at Ripple. Emi Yoshikawa, senior director of global operations at Ripple, claimed that XRP does not compete either with central bank digital currencies (CBDC) or stablecoins. In an Aug. 19 interview with Japanese crypto exchange FXcoin, Yoshikawa said that XRP is complementary to the global progress in CBDC and stablecoin development. The exec stated that XRP should be considered as a “bridge asset” in international settlement: “There are various types of crypto assets, but …