Central Bank Digital Currency

A digital currency issued by a central-banks often shorted as CBDC. The implementation and wise-scale use of CBDCs is a hypothetical technology. Many experimental implementations do not use a blockchain and are based on centralized database technologies and do not require a consensus-algorithm. This makes CBDCs technical underpinnings significantly distinct from crypto asset which are allegedly decentralized.

CBDCs are either based on an account model or token model.

CBDCs have been critized as being an extension of the surveillance state that conflicts with financial privacy norms.

Examples of pending or live CBDC projects by nation states:

  • Chinese Digital Yuan
  • Bahama Sand Dollar
  • Project Hamilton

References

  1. Hockett, Robert C. 2019. ‘Money’s Past Is Fintech’s Future: Wildcat Crypto, the Digital Dollar, and Citizen Central Banking’.
  2. Bilotta, Nicola. n.d. CBDCs and Stablecoins: The Scramble for (Controllable) Anonymity. Instituto AffariInternazionali.
  3. Kiff, John, Jihad Alwazir, Sonja Davidovic, Aquiles Farias, Ashraf Khan, Tanai Khiaonarong, Majid Malaika, et al. 2020. ‘A Survey of Research on Retail Central Bank Digital Currency’. http://ssrn.com/paper=3639760.
  4. Korhonen, Outi, and Juho Rantala. 2021. ‘Blockchain Governance Challenges: Beyond Libertarianism’. AJIL Unbound 115: 408–12. https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2021.65.
  5. Nabilou, Hossein. 2019. ‘Central Bank Digital Currencies: Preliminary Legal Observations’. Journal of Banking Regulation.
  6. Steele, Graham. 2021. ‘The Miner of Last Resort: Digital Currency, Shadow Money and the Role of the Central Bank’. Technology and Government, Emerald Studies in Media and Communications, Forthcoming.
Edit this page