R3 Researcher: Central Bank Blockchain Could Go Live In 2018A form of central bank digital currency (CBDC) may go live in 2018.
At least that's according to Antony Lewis, research director at global banking consortium and distributed ledger software startup R3, who issued the prediction during a panel discussion at the Deconomy event in Seoul, South Korea, on Wednesday.
"For wholesale use (of CBDC), I think we are looking at this year. We have had conversations with central banks who have mandates to fix certain payment problems, and one solution they look to is a blockchain type of platform," Lewis said.
Yet, Lewis clarified that this does not mean consumers will have a new payment choice that functions like bitcoin or ether do today, per se. In fact, Lewis projected that such a cryptocurrency would be used only by select financial institutions to start.
In this way, Lewis argued such a system would likely even only be used in certain specific situations, such as in instances of disaster recovery due to their current limitations.
He argued:
"Don't make your secondary (decentralized) system look like your primary (centralized) system. Otherwise If a primary system goes down in an attack, then all the attackers need to do is just to play the same trick. Then it's not resilience, it's just another IP address to attack."https://www.coindesk.com/r3-researcher-central-bank-will-issue-cryptocurrency-2018/
