In a press release earlier this week, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) announced that it was throwing its weight behind central digital currencies (CBDCs), publishing a blueprint of a future monetary system “underpinned” by this type of money.
And the BIS also heaped praise on the concept of programmable money.
The announcement of the blueprint that’s supposed to represent the foundation of the world’s new financial and monetary system came just a day after reports that the BIS and the Bank of England had completed a CBCD project.
The project – dubbed “Rosalind” – is described as a joint experiment by the BIS Innovation Hub London Center and the Bank of England, that produced 33 API functionalities and looked into over 30 retail CBDC use cases.
And those behind the “experiment” said they were satisfied that it proved an API layer could work “with different private sector applications and central bank ledger designs” – and what’s now needed is standardization of API functionalities to support many use cases.
As for the newly-published BIS blueprint, it came as a special chapter in the organization’s annual economic report, purporting that it was opening the door to “a new era” where the monetary system and the economy would develop together.
Programmable central bank money seems to be taken as the key to make this happen, by creating a single platform for transactions and contracts, thanks to putting together tokenized commercial bank money and assets “on a single platform.”
The BIS will not tell you that this could be seen as yet another move towards dangerous levels of global centralization, but rather explains its ideas as a game-changing new financial infrastructure that would offer a range of benefits.
And in this land of financial rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns, not only will things get done faster and cheaper – but new kinds of transactions will be possible, with the only limit being “the ingenuity of public and private innovators.”
But before we get there, we must accept that tokenization in this context isn’t really any good without access to central bank money, and all the “trust” that comes with it.
The proposal is to turn to what’s referred to as a unified ledger – and it could, the BIS said, “capture the full benefits of tokenization by combining central bank money, tokenized deposits and tokenized assets on a programmable platform.”
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