- The Reserve Bank of Australia has unveiled an ETH-based CBDC pilot program.
- The program saw participation from Ripple, Hedera, Binance, JPMorgan, Stellar, etc.
- Crypto lawyer Bill Morgan believes that it is a wholesale central bank digital currency.
The Australian Central Bank recently announced a central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot program based on the Ethereum blockchain. The new CBDC being tested by the Reserve Bank of Australia boasts features like direct control, programmability, atomic settlement, etc. The central bank collaborated with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC) on the blockchain research project.
The Reserve Bank of Australia recently published a 44-page research paper that explored the features and use cases of a potential Australian CBDC. One of the primary objectives in undertaking the research was to interact with industry participants in a live transactional environment to utilize the pilot CBDC.
The pilot project by the Reserve Bank of Australia saw participation from prominent crypto names including Binance, Ripple, Stellar, and traditional finance giant JPMorgan. Over the course of the program, the central bank issued more than half a million dollars worth of the policy CBDC. At the end of the project, all the CBDCs were redeemed before the subsequent shutting down of the project.
“I think this is a wholesale CBDC but if you follow the Reserve Bank’s documents you just eventually arrive at Project Dunbar and the BIS, the Central Bank of Malaysia and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and multi-CBDC shared settlement platform prototypes,” stated popular crypto lawyer Bill Morgan.
The CBDC was reportedly denominated in Australian dollars, going down to the smallest denomination. The Reserve Bank of Australia paid no interest on holdings of the pilot CBDC. As for limitations, the pilot CBDC platform did not support the deployment of smart contracts or other blockchain code.
The pilot CBDC was also not able to be directly issued on or transferred to any third-party platforms. However, it had features like atomic settlement where settlement occurred in an integrated manner and allowed the holder to have direct control without relying on an intermediary.
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