As payment methods continue to evolve, new innovations are improving financial infrastructures that have been in use for years. Currently, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are a topic that has grabbed the attention of many nations worldwide including the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Middle Eastern nation has faced considerable economic and financial hardships due to sanctions imposed on it by the United States and believes that piloting a CBDC can resolve problems associated with the blockade. Furthermore, some view a CBDC as a potential solution to the country’s perceived corruption problem. Corruption allegations have trailed Iran for decades. The …

Yet another statement by a top Indian official suggests that regulatory uncertainty around the status of digital assets in the country will persist in the near term. Responding to the general discussion of the 2022-23 Union Budget at Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of India’s bicameral parliament, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman stated that she was not going to “legalize or ban” cryptocurrency at this moment. The minister added that “Banning or not banning will come subsequently,” when the ministry reviews input from consultations. Sitharaman also mentioned that the state has “the sovereign right to tax” income that citizens derive from …

The world recently got a sneak peek at what a digital dollar, or at least one component of a hypothetical United States central bank digital currency (CBDC), might look like, courtesy of Project Hamilton, a collaborative effort of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT Digital Currency Initiative. The results of the project’s first phase were originally expected last summer but were released on Feb. 3. The project, announced in 2020, is named in honor of Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury secretary, and Margaret Hamilton, an MIT staffer who contributed to NASA’s Apollo program. Researchers developed two …

The European Commission has announced that a bill for a digital euro will be proposed in 2023. As first reported by Politico, EC finance chief Mairead McGuinness officially disclosed the EU’s formal consideration of digital euro legislation at a fintech conference on Wednesday. "Our goal is to table legislation in early 2023,” the Commissioner for Financial Service said. “A targeted legislative consultation in the coming weeks." The European Central Bank (ECB) is already experimenting with designs and systems for a digital euro, with a prototype expected sometime in late-2023. If a digital euro is to be implemented, it will require …

On the day of the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, there were reportedly more transactions made in China’s central bank digital currency than those through Visa. In a Wednesday report from the Wall Street Journal, a person familiar with the matter said transactions in digital yuan significantly outnumbered those of Visa on Feb. 4 at the Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest — the location of the opening ceremony of the 34th Olympic Winter Games. However, many of the retailers allowing purchases with China’s central bank digital currency, the digital yuan — or e-CNY …

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, or Boston Fed, has selected economist Susan M. Collins, University of Michigan provost, to serve as its new president and chief executive officer. The seat has become vacant in September 2021, when the then-president Eric Rosengren expedited his retirement amid a controversy around his securities trading while in office. Collins, who is Jamaican-American, will become the first Black woman in the Fed’s history to lead a Federal Reserve Bank. She will assume office on July 1. The Boston Fed is one of 12 regional branches of the Federal Reserve. Along with the Fed’s Board …

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has published a discussion paper on its central bank digital currency (CBDC), seeking public input on the potential benefits and risks and regulatory issues of introducing a CBDC in Kenya. In a statement, the CBK has highlighted that using a CBDC might improve cross-border payments by making them more efficient and less expensive. The regulator says that CDBC solutions can flatten the multi-layered correspondent banking structure and shorten payment chains in a discussion paper exploring the future use of a digital currency: “A key opportunity where CBK sees potential value is the use of …

Every global event or major political crisis these days can trigger a digital asset-related conversation. As China welcomes the world’s top athletes to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, showing off ultra-high-tech facilities and sports infrastructure, some United States politicians have raised concerns over the Games’ potential to act as a booster to the digital yuan’s adoption. In neighboring Myanmar, the military government that had overthrown the nation’s elected leadership a year ago is now looking into launching its own digital currency, not to project economic influence but to improve the domestic payments system and the struggling economy more broadly. Below …

With the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics completed and all competing athletes currently in China, two members of Congress are warning of the potential dangers of using digital yuan at the events. According to a Friday report from Reuters, Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Feb. 3 expressing concern that the Chinese government could use the games to promote greater adoption of its central bank digital currency, the digital yuan. The country has been conducting trials of the CBDC since April 2020, later announcing …

Theoretical research into a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the U.S. has found that distributed ledger architecture has “downsides.” The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published their findings of their initial research into a CBDC on Feb 3. The research project, dubbed “Project Hamilton,” tested a “hypothetical general purpose CBDC” using two potential models. The first one processed transactions through “ordering server” distributed ledger technology (DLT), which organized the validated transactions into blocks to create an ordered transaction history. The researchers were able to use this architecture to …

Central Bank of Jordan (CBJ) has revealed that it is researching issuing a digital currency. The central bank digital currency (CBDC) would be linked to the Jordanian dinar and have legal standing. Adel Al Sharkas, the governor of CBJ, has reportedly stated that his institution is researching the option of creating a legal digital currency. He also predicted that cryptocurrency trading might eventually be permitted in Jordan once the appropriate legislation is in place. He said: “With regards to the plans to issue a Jordanian digital currency, a study is underway to develop a legal digital currency linked to Jordanian …

In a speech discussing the budget for 2022, Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the launch of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) by 2022-23 as means to boost the country’s economic growth. Sitharaman highlighted the need for digital inclusion across numerous business verticals while announcing the fund allocation set in the Union Budget. Speaking about the launch of a digital rupee, she added that the introduction of a CBDC will provide a “big boost” to the digital economy. She also highlighted the possibility of a more efficient and cheaper currency management system made possible by digital currencies. “It is …