Fabio Panetta, an executive board member of the European Central Bank, or ECB, proposed the central bank limit the total holdings of a digital euro in an effort to prevent the digital currency from being used as a form of investment. In a Wednesday speech for the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament, Panetta hinted the ECB could cap the number of digital euros between 1 and 1.5 trillion tokens. The proposed limit would be part of an effort aiming to disincentivize residents from HODLing tokens as an investment like crypto assets, with “with larger holdings …

The U.S. thinktank Atlantic Council released a report Wednesday on cybersecurity issues related to central bank digital currencies (CBDC). The authors provide a generalized discussion of CBDC security, but with a clear focus on the United States and issues specific to it. They determined that the security risks presented by a CBDC depend heavily on its design, with performance, security and privacy being balanced variously in different designs. The report looked at six design options, only three of which are being considered or deployed in real life. Privacy was identified as the main risk from a CBDC for consumers. In …

“Everything is bigger in Texas” proved to be true during Consensus 2022. The crypto conference took place June 9–12 in Austin, Texas, this year, attracting over 20,000 people from across the globe, despite the 100-degree plus weather. According to the event sponsors, Consensus 2018, which was held at the Hilton Hotel in New York, had previously drawn in almost 9,000 attendees. Caitlin Long, CEO of Custodia — the Wyoming-based digital asset bank — told Cointelegraph that the event this year speaks volumes. “New York has sent a lot of this industry fleeing to places like Austin, Wyoming and Miami. It …

In January, the United States Federal Reserve Board of Governors released a discussion paper on a potential U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC) titled “Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation.” The comment period for the paper ended May 20, with the Fed receiving over 2,000 pages of comments from individuals alongside responses from leading stakeholders. Cointelegraph read a selection of shareholder responses to the Fed paper, and it quickly became apparent that there are plenty of confidently stated opinions but little agreement among them. The main points of commonality are in the places they …

For Daniela Barbosa — general manager of blockchain, healthcare and identity at the Linux Foundation and executive director of Hyperledger — digital currencies and cryptocurrencies have made it among the big banks at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In an interview with Cointelegraph shot against the backdrop of the Swiss Alps, Barbosa explained that in the few years she has attended the WEF, the presence of cryptocurrency companies has steadily grown. What's more, we should not be afraid of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). “CBDCs are [a]natural evolution of digital dollars and digital currencies.” While the WEF saw calls …

In discussion with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), T Rabi Sankar, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), reflected an anti-crypto stance as he spoke about India’s potential to disrupt the crypto and blockchain ecosystem. Rabi Sankar started the conversation by highlighting the success of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s in-house fiat-based peer-to-peer payments system, which has seen an average adoption and transaction growth of 160% per anum over the last five years. “One of the reasons it is so successful is because it’s simple,” he added while comparing UPI’s growth with blockchain technology. According to …

In a paper recently published by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), Fabio Araujo, an economist at the Central Bank of Brazil (CBB) who is also responsible for the country’s central bank digital currency work, revealed that the monetary authority will have greater control over the population’s money once its CBDC is rolled out. Through the so-called Real Digital, the central bank will be able to halt bank runs and impose other restrictions on citizens’ access to money. Real Digital, the digital version of Brazil’s national currency, has been debated at the central bank since 2015 and will have its …

China’s pandemic-hit economy needs all the help it can get after a surge in COVID-19 infections triggered mass lockdowns across the country. In an attempt to revive consumption, the southern city of Shenzhen used Beijing’s central bank digital currency, or CBDC, to airdrop free money to local residents. A similar strategy was used in the northern Hebei province, where even more digital yuan was deployed. Think of all the things governments can do when they have full control over fiat money on-ramps. This week’s Crypto Biz newsletter explores China’s helicopter CBDC strategy, the latest funding news from the world of …

Get ready for a fundamental change in money and payments, John Williams, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told central bank officials, academics and financial industry leaders from around the world on Wednesday. Williams delivered the opening remarks at an invitation-only workshop on monetary policy implementation co-hosted by the New York Fed and Columbia University. The central banker dismissed much of the digital asset space with a single-sentence observation that not all cryptocurrencies are backed by non-crypto assets. Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stablecoins backed by safe, liquid assets have the potential for innovation, …

The spectacle that is the World Economic Forum (WEF) came to a close in Davos, Switzerland on Friday, May 27. Nearly 3,000 people from over 110 countries took planes, trains and helicopters to the highest town in Europe to lobby leaders and push and query the WEF agenda. And, while the war in Ukraine took center stage during the WEF, climate change played the hero and economic recovery was the damsel in distress. Meanwhile, blockchain and cryptocurrency featured as — at the very least — a supporting role. As Soramitsu CEO Makoto Takemiya described during a Global Blockchain Business Council …

On Tuesday, the United States Federal Reserve released a study on the possible effects of a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) on U.S. monetary policy implementation. The study, dated April, was a staff working paper titled “Retail CBDC and U.S. Monetary Policy Implementation: A Stylized Balance Sheet Analysis.” The paper considered four scenarios that illustrate the potential effects of a retail CBDC on monetary policy from the perspective of three stakeholder groups: the Fed, commercial banks and U.S. households. The first scenario involved exchanging cash for CBDC, which affected the categorization of assets at the Fed and in the …

The United Nations is smitten with distributed ledger technology (DLT). In a conversation with Cointelegraph at WEF 2022, United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC) director Sameer Chauhan explained the “massive opportunities” he sees in cryptocurrencies. A former traditional finance executive and head of the UNICC since 2018, Chauhan has seen the rise and fall of cryptocurrency markets. He shared that groups such as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) do not want to “miss the boat” when it comes to DLTs. Chauhan explained that cryptocurrencies are neutral technologies: “It’s a tool. You could use it for good or you could …