The post Bank of England examines privacy tech for CBDC appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Homepage > News > Finance > Bank of England examines privacy enhancing technologies for CBDC The Bank of England (BoE)—the United Kingdom’s central bank—has released a paper in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Digital Currency Initiative (MIT DCI) exploring privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) for a possible digital pound. The paper is the result of an increasing enthusiasm from many countries around the globe for some form of central bank digital currency (CBDC)—the digital form of a country’s fiat currency, regulated by its central bank—which has come into conflict with an equally strong anti-CBDC lobby, whose primary concerns revolve around the thorny issues of state surveillance and citizen privacy. According to the Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker, as of December 2024, 35 retail CBDCs are already in the pilot stage, with 13 more in development. Additionally, 25 wholesale CBDCs are also in the pilot stage, with 11 further in development. CBDCs can be broadly broken down into two main categories, ‘retail’ and ‘wholesale’. A retail CBDC is a digital currency issued by a central bank for public use, enabling individuals and businesses to make everyday transactions. A wholesale CBDC, on the other hand, is designed for financial institutions to conduct large-scale interbank transactions, improving efficiency in the financial system. The former of these two forms of CBDC seems to inspire the greater fears around ‘big brother’ and the insidious overreach of government surveillance. While overblown, these fears are not without foundation, as a monetary system based on blockchain’s immutable, distributed ledger technology would potentially allow a central bank to track exactly when and how every individual citizen is spending their money. For this reason, the BoE—currently developing both a retail and wholesale CBDC—partnered with the MIT DCI to publish a paper exploring privacy-enhancing solutions. “The Bank of England and HM Treasury’s 2023 Consultation Paper on the digital pound made clear that…

---

Filed under: News - @ December 13, 2024 2:25 pm