The Reserve Bank's Central Bank Digital Currency Trial

Last week the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) released its report on the CBDC research project which it conducted with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (see here). The project entailed the trial of relevant use cases in a live transactional environment, making use of CBDC issued by the RBA that carries a real legal claim on the RBA. The trial, which took place between March and July this year, set out to understand the value of a CBDC to the Australia economy and payments systems.

To ensure that the trial produced useful results, it was conducted using legitimate applications of a pilot CBDC. To achieve this, some of the key features of this trial's methodology included the use of Ethereum-based distributed ledger technology and a requirement on participants to be appropriately licensed and meet necessary regulatory requirements. CBDC holders were also enabled to directly control the CBDC without intermediaries.