Group items tagged

With this in mind, central banks should champion sCBDC. Let private providers compete in providing some sort of central bank-sanctioned version of digital currency to the masses. The central bank can limit itself to maintaining the back end and offering a degree of regulation. If sCBDC does not work, the central bank's reputation won't be tarnished. And, if sCBDC does take off, the central bank need not worry about its attention being diverted by all the day-to-day concerns of interacting with a retail clientele.

George Selgin makes a pitch for the US Fed to facilitate the issuance of synthetic central bank digital currency (sCBDC) as opposed to the intermediated variant (iCBDC) that its recent consultative paper seems to advocate. In the synthetic approach, payment service providers (PSPs) offer digital currency (DC) that is fully backed by reserves held and ring-fenced from the PSPs' other creditors in Fed Master Accounts. In the intermediated approach, the Fed makes CBDC available to the PSPs who would act as the Fed's agents (i.e. as custodians and trustees of end user CBDC holdings). Selgin notes that sCBDC will better promote DC diversity and innovation, because it allows for numerous, entirely distinct retail DCs, whereas iCBDC provides for a single DC only, albeit one offered at and administered by numerous private-sector firms. An iCBDC is likely to be a fairly, if not fully, homogeneous digital product, instead of a set of such products with different features designed to serve the needs of different clients. However, the Fed has so far been reluctant to do open up its Master Accounts to nonbanks, which would be required to get the maximum sCBDC benefits.

Tobias Adrian, a financial counselor and director of the IMF's Monetary and Capital Markets Department, gave a keynote address last week at the "Building CBDC: A Race To Reality" conference, sponsored by blockchain software firm R3. Adrian offered two models for the provision of a CBDC, varying in how they would pair the private sector with central banks. The first model looked at synthetic CBDCs (sCBDC), which are backed by the liabilities of a central bank but issued with the aid of a private entity, such as a commercial bank. The second, "two-tiered," model puts central banks in charge of the issuance of a CBDC and transaction settlement, with technology likely to be occasionally updated. As such, the sCBDC model would spur private sector-led innovation at a more "fundamental level," he said.

Three UK Fintechs and two major European banks have successfully conducted a proof of concept showcasing the benefits of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in offering near-instant settlement in capital markets and payments. It was the first cross-chain pilot debt transaction on the public Ethereum and the Fnality Payment System (FnPS). Fnality expects to launch the FnPS, which is to be based on a wholesale synthetic CBDC (sCBDC), sometime in 2022. (However, I'll believe that when I see it, because issuing that sCBDC will require some hard-to-get central bank cooperation.)

"Central Banks should champion sCBDC. Let private providers compete in providing some sort of central bank-sanctioned version of digital currency to the masses. The central bank can limit itself to maintaining the back end and offering a degree of regulation."

Whether central banks adopt CBDC at all is another matter and will result from carefully weighing pros and cons. But to the extent central banks wish to offer a digital alternative to cash, they should consider sCBDC as a potentially attractive option.

The distinction between synthetic central bank digital currency (sCBDC) and intermediated CBDC (iCBDC) will be of interest mainly to lawyers and regulators. From an economic perspective, the two products appear to be very close--if not perfect--substitutes (again, assuming their design is optimized). The practical difference between a Federal Reserve liability and a private liability fully-insured by the government seems almost non-existent to me.

Fnality, formed of a consortium of 14 major banks, is aiming is to create the means of payment on-chain for financial markets by use of its Utility Settlement Coin (USC). The USC is similar to JPMorgan's JPM Coin, but backed by central bank deposits. Fnality is currently seeking approval for such deposits from several central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank, with the intentions to receive its first green light in Q3 of 2020.

The Bank of Jamaica is inviting interested central bank digital currency (CBDC) providers to develop and test potential CBDC solutions in its recently established Fintech Regulatory Sandbox. Households and businesses would be able to use the proposed CBDC to make payments and store value, as they do now with cash. However the Bank is assuring the public that it will continue to issue bank notes and coins. The CBDC would be issued to licensed deposit taking institutions on a wholesale basis just as now being done with physical currency, which makes it sound like possibly a synthetic CBDC.

Meituan Dianping, the China's largest wholesale and delivery platform, is the latest firm to to join the People's Bank of China's central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot that launched in April. They join DiDi Chuxing, China's Uber counterpart, and streaming platform Bilibili. The total number of customers of the three services combined is over 1 billion people within China. The CBDCpilot is reportedly being conducted in four cities: Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu and Xiong'an. Other pilot participants include four state-owned banks, including the Agricultural Bank of China, and a number of large companies, including Huawei, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell recently dismissed the idea of private sector involvement in the development of a CBDC, but other current and former senior officials, such as Brian Brooks (Acting Comptroller of the Currency) and Christopher Giancarlo (former CFTC Chairman) disagree. Will we see the Federal Reserve launch a CBDC wholly on its own? Or will we see a few different Fed-endorsed "digital dollars" piloted simultaneously, perhaps some issued by the Fed and others by private companies or banks? It may be worth exploring a hybrid licensing framework whereby the federal government sets out technical, regulatory, and oversight requirements for the private sector to issue competing "digital dollars," while still preserving the benefits of a Fed-run "public option."

While Gorton and Zhang, and the IMF, have the right idea of building a public/private partnership by backing privately issued stablecoins with a central bank liability (e.g. reserves), they picked the wrong liability - or at least the wrong version. A more practical and efficient method of backing a privately-issued stablecoin would be to replace (off-chain) central bank reserves with an (on-chain) central bank blockchain-based liability, or CBBL for short. Another way of thinking about a CBBL is it's effectively a tokenized form of the trust we have in central banks, but it's more efficient, transparent, and accessible than traditional central bank reserves.

According to the New York Fed's Antoine Martin, "instead of issuing a retail central bank digital currency (#CBDC), central banks could support stablecoins by allowing them to be backed one-for-one with balances in a central bank account. They could also facilitate a bankruptcy remote legal structure to ensure that end-users are paid in full even if the issuer becomes bankrupt. Such stablecoins could be a close substitute for central bank digital money, while balances in a central bank account are risk free and could earn interest. Though stablecoin issuers should be subject to some oversight in exchange for access to a central bank account."

Nomura is investing in Fnality, the interbank payment and settlement platform that uses "synthetic" wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) to settle transactions on distributed ledger technology (DLT) based financial market infrastructures (FMIs). (A "synthetic CBDC" is essentially a stablecoin backed by central bank deposits.) Fnality is expected to launch its first such synthetic CBDC in October 2022, pegged to the British Pound and backed by deposits at the Bank of England.

"I really hate to do this, @CaitlinLong_ as I count myself a fan of yours as well as a fan and friend of Manhoman Singh, whose work you mention. But I'm afraid your thread commending some aspects of Liberty Street's stablecoin post strikes me as more self-serving than accurate."

"The narrow stablecoin alternative is a middle course: instead of having the Fed enter the retail CBDC business, it would have it offer its wholesale accounts and services to a broad set of retail digital currency or stablecoin providers-and not just to insured banks and thrifts."

The US-based Bank Policy Institute (BPI) is raising concerns that a sizeable proportion of Circle's USDC stablecoin reserves could be parked at the Federal Reserve, despite Circle not having a central bank account. Since November, BlackRock has been managing about two-thirds of the reserve assets in a bespoke money market fund, the Circle Reserve Fund (CRF) , which invests mostly in U.S. short-dated Treasuries. The BPI claims that Blackrock has applied for the fund to access the Fed's overnight reverse repo (ON RRP) facility, which provides money funds and government-sponsored enterprises a standing option to invest overnight with the Fed at a fixed rate, currently 4.3%. This involves the fund buying Treasuries from the Fed, which are resold to the Fed at a future date at a slightly higher price. The net effect of the cash flows, with the transfer of money to the Fed, is not dissimilar to depositing the USDC reserve cash at the Federal Reserve. The use of the ON RRP by the CRF could effectively transform USDC into a "backdoor" synthetic central bank digital currency (CBDC) if all of the assets are parked there. https://bpi.com/will-usdcs-blackrock-money-fund-create-a-back-door-cbdc-give-usdc-an-account-at-the-fed-or-both/

Fnality and HQLAᵡ have completed end-to-end testing to enable intraday sterling repo settlement on the Eurex Repo F7 platform via their two blockchain networks. They plan to go live in Q4 2024 subject to UK regulatory approvals. Fnality is a UK-regulated systemic payment system and HQLAᵡ operates a digital collateral registry to enable intraday collateral movement. Fnality's settlement instrument is effectively a "synthetic" wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) - i..e., a sterling-denominated stablecoin backed by deposits in a Bank of England omnibus account. In conventional repo transactions, the collateral settlement takes two days, but on the Fnality/HQLAᵡ platform, trades can be settled on a atomically intra-day delivery-versus-payment (DvP) basis. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/eurex_eurex-repo-dlt-activity-7208755407740137472-g29d/