As communicated by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), they will join the Commonwealth Bank and the National Australia Bank for the ConsenSys project to develop a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency).
We are partnering with Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Perpetual and ConsenSys Software to explore the potential use and implications of a wholesale form of central bank digital currency using distributed ledger technology – https://t.co/yYMi2Y4Uvm
— Reserve Bank of Australia (@RBAInfo) November 1, 2020
In the press release, it is stated that the efforts will produce, by the end of the year, a PoC (Proof of Concept) to create a CBDC tokenized asset that will be used within the market in which all these entities will operate.
This PoC should enable the movement of funds and other operations such as loans. The Australian CBDC will rely on a DLT platform that is based on the Ethereum blockchain, so it echoes the concepts but in a centralized way.
The CBDC of the Bank of Australia
The project focuses on efficiency and better risk management, remarked the assistant governor of the financial system, Michele Bullock:
“With this project we are aiming to explore the implications of a CBDC for efficiency, risk management and innovation in wholesale financial market transactions. While the case for the use of a CBDC in these markets remains an open question, we are pleased to be collaborating with industry partners to explore if there is a future role for a wholesale CBDC in the Australian payments system”.
As mentioned, this project will be developed by the end of 2020 and will be launched next year, so as to allow all the necessary tests to understand the functioning and the real benefits of such a system.
This is not the first bank to join the ConsenSys project. In fact, only last week the French Societe Generale also announced that it had chosen this very company to create a CBDC to be launched next year.
So it seems that for the moment ConsenSys is well-positioned to be the entity behind most CBDCs and that 2021 will be the year of central bank digital currencies, also because it appears that China will also deploy its digital yuan, with a wallet for managing it within Huawei smartphones.
