In an announcement last month, the European Central Bank (ECB) revealed the five companies that have been selected to partake in a “prototyping exercise” as part of the two-year investigation phase of the digital euro project. Amazon, Caixabank, the European Payments Initiative (EPI), Nexi and...
Financial messaging system SWIFT said that it has solved one of the thorniest problems central bank digital currency (CBDC) developers have been wrestling with: How to use them for cross-border transactions. Making CBDCs interoperable is difficult. Few of the roughly 100 countries building, studying or...
A group of Republican lawmakers is asking the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to weigh in on the Federal Reserve’s proposed creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). In a letter dated Wednesday (Oct. 5), 11 GOP members of the House Committee on Financial...
A study analyzing the international use of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and the underlying distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) shows promise for cross-border interoperability among countries with varying and emerging digital ecosystems. Launched about eight months ago by financial messaging system SWIFT, in partnership with...
A digital euro might be based on blockchain technology, but it will require middlemen to validate transactions, at least to begin with. The core purpose of blockchain cryptocurrency, as described in the Bitcoin Whitepaper that launched the technology, was to solve the double-spend problem in...
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) says it has carried out the first pilot of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) involving “four jurisdictions and real-value transactions.” According to a statement published Tuesday (Sept. 27) on the BIS LinkedIn page, the pilot involved the BIS...
A digital euro isn’t going to replace the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency and leading international payments currency anytime soon. But it could help weaken it, or even speed its demise. That’s one thing to take away from European Central Bank (ECB)...
The central banks of Sweden and Israel announced Wednesday (Sept. 28) that they will start exploring how central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can be used for international retail and remittance payments in collaboration with the central bank of Norway and the Bank for International Settlements....
An advisor to the European Central Bank (ECB) is defending the decision to make Amazon one of the five companies to test a digital euro. “The prototyping experiments for the front end are driven by technological considerations,” Jürgen Schaaf said at a panel hosted by...