The Bank of Russia announced the establishment of the first pilot group for testing the digital ruble, bringing together 12 Russian banks. The Bank also reaffirmed its plans to complete a prototype digital ruble platform by the end of 2021 and roll out testing in January 2022.
According to an article in the Spanish press, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSE), the governing political body in Spain, has proposed creating a national digital currency. According to the PSOE, a national digital currency would allow for more active Spain-specific monetary policy, such as providing a more direct mechanism to injecting liquidity directly into the system. However, this is just a bad interpretation of the actual proposal, which is merely proposing to launch a study group to support the ECB’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) ruminations. (Thanks to David Tercero-Lucas for clarifying this!)
A growing number of crypto asset firms are abandoning attempts to register with the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Crypto-related firms have since January had to register with the FCA before doing business, but just six have registered, with dozens more still being assessed but not yet deemed “fit and proper”. Around 64 have withdrawn their applications.
Out of the 50 digital challenger banks operating in Asia Pacific (APAC), just ten operators are profitable. These providers are primarily located in China and Japan, indicating that the two nations offer the most mature and developed digital banking landscapes in the region, according to a new analysis by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
US Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Randal K. Quarles is not a big fan of a digital dollar: “First, the U.S. dollar payment system is very good, and it is getting better. Second, the potential benefits of a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency (CBDC) are unclear. Third, developing a CBDC could pose considerable risks.”
El Salvador’s citizens will not be forced to use the government-issued Chivo (“Cool”) Bitcoin wallet when the country’s Bitcoin (BTC) law takes effect on September 7. The Chivo wallet will not incur fees or commissions for transfers, and unlike traditional crypto exchanges, it will not take a cut for converting BTC to USD and vice versa, plus, unlike credit cards, there will be no commissions charged to merchants or users. Also, the $30 government BTC handout announced on June 25 would not be convertible into USD, to emphasize the government’s intention to encourage the use of Bitcoin and the Chivo wallet. But any money held in USD or BTC in the Chivo wallet will be able to be withdrawn into USD cash at any time once the government has completed its roll-out of 200 new physical Bitcoin ATM branches.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) launched the Global CBDC Challenge, to seek innovative retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) solutions to enhance payment efficiencies and promote financial inclusion. Partners include the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Firms around the world are invited to submit innovative solutions that can address 12 problem statements centered on the CBDC instrument, distribution; and infrastructure.
Up to 15 finalists will be selected to receive mentorship from industry experts and be given access to the APIX Digital Currency Sandbox for rapid prototyping of digital currency solutions. The Sandbox will offer a comprehensive test and development platform that includes core-banking APIs from APIX, payment APIs from Mojaloop, digital currency APIs from Mastercard, Partior and R3, and more than 100 APIs provided via the APIX marketplace. Finalists will pitch their solutions at November’s Singapore FinTech Festival , and up to three winners will be selected, with each receiving $50,000 in prize money. The deadline for application submissions is July 23.
Binance stopped its services to clients from Ontario, Canada, following the Ontario Securities Commission’s (OSC) notice to Binance and multiple and crypto exchanges for their violation of the local securities laws. Meanwhile, the firm is facing regulatory troubles in multiple other jurisdictions, including a ban from operating in the United Kingdom imposed by the Financial Conduct Authority, and a warning by Japan’s Financial Services Agency for operating in the country without being registered.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) recently proposed Basel III capital requirements for banks holding cryptoassets. According to Caitlin Long, the proposal treats stablecoins prudently, rightly suggesting they can more or less fit into the existing Basel framework. But the proposed treatment of Group 2 crypto-assets — those that have no issuer, such as bitcoin — completely misses the biggest risk: settlement risk for the banks handling the bitcoin. Traditional banks are simply not set up operationally or technologically to hold on-balance sheet assets, such as bitcoin, that settle in minutes with irreversibility. Bitcoin has no operational fault tolerance.
The Palestinian Monetary Authority is reportedly studying the possible issuance of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Bound by 1990s accords with Israel, Palestine does not have a currency of its own. Instead, the Israeli shekel serves as the de facto currency, alongside the Jordanian dinar and the U.S. dollar. Palestinian banks are prohibited from making large cross-border cash transfers — including to Israel — and are often forced to borrow money to cover remittances. It is hoped that a Palestinian CBDC may address that issue.
El Salvador will be giving out $30 in bitcoin to any of its adult citizens who download the Chivo e-wallet and go through the facial recognition process. On June 8, El Salvador approved its bitcoin bill, stating the cryptocurrency will become legal tender in the country on September 7. It also committed to providing exchange services for merchants, while also requiring that they accept bitcoin. Although the latter requirement is controversial, it is claimed that it would be discriminatory if businesses weren’t forced to accept bitcoin because the unbanked wouldn’t necessarily have another means of payment.
Gemini Trust purchased about $4 million in credits to help offset the carbon emissions footprint of the Bitcoin it holds in custody. The firm made a donation in that amount to Climate Vault. The nonprofit purchased the permits, which will prevent more than 341,000 metric tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere. Gemini plans to continue to offset its carbon footprint until only renewable energy is used in securing the Bitcoin network.
To carry out its plan to make Bitcoin legal tender, El Salvador will rely on partners like Zap Solutions, whose digital wallet Strike is already being used by some Salvadorans. Although Strike has the technology to help El Salvador embrace Bitcoin, it appears not to have the US money transmitter licenses needed to make it useful for sending remittances from the United States. This could make many cash and crypto transfers to El Salvador using Strike potentially illegal.
The Smart Payment Association (SPA) has warned that the bottlenecks that are currently hitting the production of semiconductors is trickling down to some payment card manufacturers, who are facing difficulties securing the components they need to produce the items. With the shortage showing no sign of ending for another year at least, this could cause some major issues for consumers. “If the situation does not improve, there are going to be millions of cards missing and this will have a direct impact on consumers worldwide who will not be able to get a bank card or the renewal of their bank card. Without a card, you cannot pay in store, nor online, nor withdraw cash.”
I’ve set out my definition of what is and isn’t a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) in a new post. It may be obvious to most, but you’d be surprised how many people misspecify various privately- and sovereign-issued crypto as CBDC. My current definition, borrowed from the BIS is a “broadly available general purpose digital payment instrument, denominated in the jurisdiction’s unit of account, that is a direct liability of the jurisdiction’s monetary authority.” A suggestion has been made to add: “subject to the same rules and regulations as imposed on the jurisdiction’s other units of account.” More comments welcome!
I’ve set out my definition of what is and isn’t a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) in a new post. It may be obvious to most, but you’d be surprised how many people misspecify various privately- and sovereign-issued crypto as CBDC. Comments welcome!
The National Bank of Rwanda is reportedly studying the possibilities of issuing CBDC. According to John Karamuka, the Director of Payment Systems at the central bank, their assessment and study is looking at economic, financial and technology aspects related to CBDC as well as the operationalization model, taking into account the local context. “The study is also analyzing the implication of the CBDC on monetary policy and financial stability.”
Bank of Israel Deputy Governor Andrew Abir reportedly said that Israel has conducted a pilot test of a digital shekel. However, a more recent Bloomberg report implies that it’s actually an Ethereum-based proof of concept test.
A Bank for International Settlements (BIS) paper examines how CBDCs can contribute to an open, safe and competitive monetary system that supports innovation and serves the public interest. Like the latest generation of instant retail payment systems, retail CBDCs could ensure open payment platforms and a competitive level playing field that is conducive to innovation. The ultimate benefits of adopting a new payment technology will depend on the competitive structure of the underlying payment system and data governance arrangements. The same technology that can encourage a virtuous circle of greater access, lower costs and better services might equally induce a vicious circle of data silos, market power and anti-competitive practices. CBDCs and open platforms are the most conducive to a virtuous circle. CBDCs built on digital identification could improve cross-border payments, and limit the risks of currency substitution. Multi-CBDC arrangements could surmount the hurdles of sharing digital IDs across borders, but will require international cooperation.
Strike CEO Jack Mallers revealed that the firm would be integrating with the top five banks and two biggest cashpoint distributors in El Salvador. He said the cashpoint stores would enable people to exchange cash for balances on a mobile app like Strike and vice versa. The integrations would remove the need for USDT because Strike would be able to hold customers’ balances at the banks. It would also give them more places to cash out those balances for fiat currencies. The original plan was to hold recipient funds in USDT due to Strike’s limited banking options at the time.
The bitcoin futures basis trade, in which a trader would buy bitcoin in the spot market today and sell long-dated futures, locking in the discrepancy between the two prices, has collapsed along with crypto prices. Hedge funds piled into the trade, which could previously reliably produce double-digit annual gains. Even better, the arbitrage was virtually risk-free, given that CME Group Inc. is the counterparty. However, the trade existed because long-dated futures were more expensive than shorter-dated ones, given that Bitcoin is inherently scarce and theoretically should rise — a structure known as contango.
Amidst the weak price action, the activity in the cryptocurrency market is also dying down. The number of transactions in blockchain per day has been dropping throughout 2021, ever since they hit 392k on January 7. The all-time high was made in December 2017 at 478.96k, and in early May 2019, per day transactions came close but only hit 441.85k. However, Layer 2 solution Lightning Network is seeing an increase in Bitcoin capacity, the number of nodes, and the number of channels — all three making new all-time highs.
Goldman Sachs has joined the blockchain-based network created by JPMorgan Chase for repurchase agreements that use smart contracts and a digitized version of the U.S. dollar. On June 17 it swapped a tokenized version of a U.S. Treasury bond for JPMCoin, JPMorgan’s internal representation of a digital dollar. The digitized upgrade provides same-day settlement ability using smart contracts on an Ethereum-based blockchain that allow cash and Treasuries to be returned instantaneously.
I’ve set out my definition of what is and isn’t a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) in a new post. It may be obvious to most, but you’d be surprised how many people misspecify various privately- and sovereign-issued crypto as CBDC. Comments welcome!
USDT issuance has begun to stagnate while the circulating supply of USDC continues. There has also been an increase in USDC deposited onto exchanges while the amount of USDT has declined. This is significant because Tether printing has historically been the impetus for major market moves, but its continued legal challenges and questions regarding assets held in reserve have made holding the token more of a liability as regulators increasingly crackdown on the cryptocurrency market.
According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a broadly available general purpose digital payment instrument, denominated in the jurisdiction’s unit of account, that is a direct liability of the jurisdiction’s monetary authority. To this I would add, subject to the same rules and regulations as imposed on the jurisdiction’s other units of account. By “general purpose” is meant that it can be used by the public, for day-to-day payments rather than CBDCs restricted to wholesale, financial market payments. A liability issued by a monetary authority that is not in its own currency (i.e., where it does not have monetary authority) is not a CBDC. I’ve summarized this definition in the table below and have added that it can be used for peer-to-peer transactions, which the Banque de France also views as an essential characteristic.
In previous versions of this tabulation, I included legal tender status as a key characteristic. A currency’s legal tender status entitles a debtor to discharge monetary obligations by tendering the currency to the creditor. However, a recent IMF working paper casts doubts on whether a digital currency can, or even should be given legal tender status. For example, designating CBDC as legal tender is not obvious if broad layers in the population are not positioned to technically receive it as a means of payment (e.g., not owning a computer or smartphone). Legally, it may not be possible either, because the creditor without access to the technology cannot accept the payment even if she wants to.
Anyways, this is the definition I’ve been applying to my real-time tabulation of retail CBDC explorers, but I frequently get suggestions to add new entries that don’t fit my definition. However, many turn out to be clearly wholesale CBDC, which are easy to identify and reject. And there are several more subtle ones that pop up, such as the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI) SOV, and Cambodia’s Project Bakong, that I will briefly run through here. The SOV is easy to reject because there is no RMI monetary authority, and it is not denominated in the country’s unit of account, which is the U.S. dollar.
Cambodia’s Project Bakong has been sometimes called a quasi-form of CBDC but from my read of the white paper, it is arguably at most some form of synthetic retail CBDC. To me it appears to be a central bank-run interbank retail payments system that runs on distributed ledger technology rails that requires that any user balances be parked at the central bank. That makes it possibly a synthetic CBDC, in the same way that China’s AliPay and WeChat Pay are because they are required to park user funds at the People’s Bank of China. But in all these cases, the digital currencies are not issued by and direct liabilities of the central banks, so they’re not CBDC.
And the National Bank of Cambodia’s Chey Serey would seem to agree that Bakong isn’t a CBDC. “Instead, the platform augments the existing Fast and Secure Transfer (FAST), real-time retail payment system and Cambodian Shared Switch (CSS) that facilitate mainly interbank transactions among commercial banks and MFIs. They were launched respectively in 2016 and 2017 and are Cambodian riel (KHR) and US dollar account-based systems that do not interoperate with the twenty or so PSPs that serve mainly the unbanked. With the launch of Bakong, banks, MFIs and PSPs have a ready-made universal mobile app interface to connect users with FAST, CSS and each other.”
However, I have been long maintaining the Banco Central del Ecuador’s Dinero Electrónico mobile payment system in my CBDC explorer tabulation but being somewhat uneasy about its inclusion. The program, which operated between 2014 and 2018, allowed citizens to transfer USD balances in real-time from person to person using basic cell phones. From my read of a recent paper on the Dinero Electrónico it would seem to be a central bank-run USD asset-backed stablecoin. Like with the RMI, the USD is the country’s unit of account, but in this case the digital currency is indeed denominated in Ecuador’s unit of account, and it was issued by, and a liability of, the central bank. Hence, it’s a CBDC by my definition.
However, Marcelo Prates has suggested that digital currencies like the Dinero Electrónico is nothing more than a stablecoin issued by a central bank. Basically if the central bank can’t issue traditional money (reserves + cash), it can’t issue the “digital” version of this money. Hence, by this logic, only central banks that issue their own currency can issue CBDC, which precludes completely dollarized country central banks from issuing CBDC. Besides U.S. territories, these include Ecuador, El Salvador, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama, Timor-Leste, and Zimbabwe. The same would go for countries in the eurozone and other currency unions. But would countries with currencies anchored to another country’s would still be able to issue CBDC?
BTW some might note that I don’t include in my tabulation the Avant smart card system created by the Bank of Finland in the 1990’s that was the world’s first CBDC. It is indeed a CBDC, but my tabulation seeks to cover CBDC projects that are potentially still live, whereas Avant shut down in 2006. However, I have added a new section to my tabulation for retail CBDC projects that have been shut down.
In that regard, I’m tempted to drop the Banco Central del Ecuador’s Dinero Electrónico from my CBDC explorer tabulation because it is now similarly defunct, and it is questionable whether the Ecuador central bank can even issue a CBDC. But alternatively, I could include the Avant as a CBDC that has launched/ piloted. Any thoughts out there?
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) summoned Alipay and several major domestic to reiterate its prohibition on the provision of services linked to trading of virtual currencies, such as providing payment channels for crypto exchanges and over-the-counter platforms. Shortly after the PBOC’s statement, the ICBC, ABC, CBC and AliPay all issued a similar notice, stating that if any users were found dealing with crypto transactions, they would terminate the relevant customer accounts and would report the issue to the relevant authorities.
Many Bitcoin mines in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province – one of China’s largest cryptocurrency mining bases – were reportedly closed as of Sunday, after local authorities ordered a halt to mining in the region on Friday amid an intensified nationwide crackdown against cryptocurrency mining. The ban also means that more than 90 percent of China’s Bitcoin mining capacity is estimated to be shut down, at least for the short term, as regulators in other key mining hubs in China’s north and southwest regions have taken similar harsh steps.
On June 18, the Banque de France successfully conducted a central bank digital currency (CBDC) experiment with SEBA Bank, as part of the experimental program launched in March 2020. The CBDC was used to simulate the settlement of listed securities and trigger their delivery in the TARGET2-Securities (T2S) test environment, using T2S’s conditional securities delivery (CoSD) feature. The Banque de France simulated CBDC issuance on a public blockchain, preserving control and confidentiality of transactions using a dedicated smart contract.
