The Bank of England and U.K. Treasury are exploring the feasibility of an official “Britcoin.” This, as a formal consultation launched Tuesday (Feb. 7) aims to develop guardrails around introducing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for the U.K. that may one day sit alongside...
Indian banks and retailers have reportedly begun accepting contactless payments made with digital rupees. The move is part of the Reserve Bank of India’s retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot project, TechCrunch reported. Reliance Retail is the first merchant to take part in the...
Programmability is one of the major draws of digital money. It is also one of the features of cryptocurrencies that is being seriously considered by central bank digital currency (CBDC) designers. But what exactly programmability means in the context of CBDCs is up for debate....
Leave it to the lofty inspirations of the World Economic Forum to come up with the Universal Digital Payments Network. This, as the new cross-border digital currency payments portal made its debut Thursday (Jan. 19) in the Swiss resort-turned-summit under the shortened “UDPN” moniker, with...
The People’s Bank of China has reportedly enabled Android users to make offline payments using digital yuan. With a new function added to the bank’s digital yuan app, users can make payments from their smartphone using the central bank digital currency (CBDC) even if the...
The Bahamas’ two-year-old digital currency project has gotten off to a slow start. The reasons are twofold, according to a Saturday (Jan. 14) Bloomberg News report: COVID-19, and FTX. Kimwood Mott, the project manager for digital currency implementation at the Central Bank of the Bahamas,...
The Bank of Tanzania is cautiously readying a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The country’s central bank said it will “continue to monitor, research and collaborate with stakeholders, including other central banks, in the efforts to arrive at a suitable and appropriate use and technology...
Public-private partnerships have yielded great things from railroads to universities, and now they stand to be a transformative force in the future of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). This is analyzed in the report “Why Public-Private Collaboration Is Key To Blockchain Adoption,” a PYMNTS and...
Central banks around the world have diverged in the design of CBDCs. As the investigation phase of the European Central Bank’s (ECB) digital euro project moves into technical considerations, the question of which path it will follow arises. Will the digital euro look like China’s...
