Fed, BOE officials share continuing interest in CBDCs, stablecoin regulation
The Federal Reserve Board continues to research a central bank digital currency (CBDC), or at least adjacent technologies, vice chair Michael Barr said on Oct. 27. He also touched on stablecoins at the Economics of Payments XII Conference where his English colleague Sir Jon Cunliffe made his last speech as deputy governor of the Bank of England (BOE).
The Fed’s research is currently focused on “end-to-end system architecture,” such as ledgers and tokenization and custody models for an intermediated CBDC, Barr said in Washington. Barr repeated the Fed mantra of no digital dollar without a congressional mandate, but added that “learning from both domestic and international experimentation can aid decisionmakers in understanding how we can best support responsible innovation.”
Barr’s remarks are not controversial on the surface, but bring to mind Representative Tom Emmer’s call for an end to the Fed’s “sketchy” CBDC research made in the House of Representatives in September.
Related: Stablecoin market escaping US regulatory oversight: Chainalysis
Cunliffe, whose ten-year term in office ends on Oct. 31, spoke at the conference a day earlier. He too emphasized that no decision has been made in his country on a CBDC. But he said a consultation paper published in February “concluded that current trends and technological advances in payments […] made it likely that a Digital Pound would be needed by the end of the decade.”
The Deputy Governor of the BOE Sir Jon Cunliffe hiding his excitement of the coming CBDC
Can you read between the lines Anon? pic.twitter.com/RPq0Bv8J9P
The consultation paper received 50,000 responses, Cunliffe said. Privacy, programmability and the decline of cash were the top concerns among commenters.
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