CBDC Round-Up

Much Work Required Before a CBDC Possible in Australia

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has been researching CBDCs. Its latest work found legal, regulatory, technical and operation issues that suggest an early launch of a CBDC is unlikely.

The RBA has been running 14 pilot projects with industry partners to understand the benefits of a possible CBDC. These included looking at what programmable payments, atomic settlement and offline payments could offer. One finding was the opportunity for a CBDC to enable the development of new forms of privately issued digital money, including tokenised bank deposits or CBDC-backed stablecoins.

What became clear was the importance and need for developing a legal and a regulatory framework suitable for the innovations a CBDC could enable. It also showed challenges in integrating a CBDC platform with industry use case applications.