The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) publishes its two-year research study into wholesale CBDCs or central bank digital currencies that puts light on the benefits of autonomizing and digitizing manual, paper-based banking processes using distributed ledger technology (DLT).
The two-year project, titled “Project Atom,” was studied in collaboration with the National Australia Bank (NAB), the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), ConsenSys, and Perpetual. It also had the involvement of King & Wood Mallesons.
Australia ambitious on crypto regulatory revolution
Commonwealth Bank of Australia was recently in the headlines with its crypto trading service launch on its app. Matt Comyn, the CEO of the bank, recently also said that missing out on crypto-assets is riskier than investing in them.
Michele Bullock, the assistant governor of RBA, pointed out that Project Atom has demonstrated the ability of a wholesale CBDC and asset tokenization to boost innovation, efficiency, and risk management in wholesale financial market transactions.
In contrast to a retail CBDC, which is offered to the public for transactions, a wholesale CBDC is a central bank-issued digital currency meant for the processing of interbank transfers and transactions between financial institutions.
The CBDC research was posted on Wednesday, the same day when Josh Frydenberg, the treasurer and deputy Liberal leader, revealed the world-leading crypto reforms and the country’s ambitions on fintech and crypto regulatory revolution. The government has signaled a minimum of six crypto reform proposals suggested by a Senate committee.
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The country has seen a massive crypto adoption this year, which is evident by a recent report revealing that the women increased their crypto portfolio by 100% in 2020.
The bank said that it has already explored the CBDCs since 2018 amid many countries racing to follow the same path as China. However, Australia has gradually moved its focus towards digital currency since 2020.
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