U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Virtual Hearing - D | Logos Pilled ///

U.S. House Committee on Financial Services
Virtual Hearing - Digitizing the Dollar: Investigating the Technological... (EventID=112783)

On Tuesday, June 15, 2021, at 10:00 a.m. (ET) Task Force on Financial Technology Chairman Lynch and Ranking Member Emmer will host a virtual hearing entitled, “Digitizing the Dollar: Investigating the Technological Infrastructure, Privacy, and Financial Inclusion Implications of Central Bank Digital Currencies."

Overview

Traditional electronic payment systems are electronic representations of fiat currency and require a network of financial intermediaries who maintain accurate ledgers. Since 2008, a new digital asset class that uses cryptography and distributed ledger technology (DLT) has gained prominence and value in the global economy. These digital assets, often called cryptocurrencies, usually require no centralized intermediary to buy, sell, or exchange since the ledgers are public, mathematically verified, and stored on a distributed network of computers. However, the rise of decentralized cryptocurrencies and private digital currencies has helped spur debate around the concept of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), which would be issued by a government’s central bank – such as the Federal Reserve System (Fed) – and would replicate some features of cryptocurrencies. A CBDC is generally considered a digital payment instrument that is a direct liability of a central bank, but since implementation is, by definition, left to each sovereign state, CBDC designs will inevitably vary.

In response to rapid innovation in digital assets across the globe, the Fed, the central banking system of the U.S., has shown greater involvement and interest over the past several years, as demonstrated by the launch of a multi-year collaboration between the Boston Fed and MIT to code and test a hypothetical CBDC. This hearing will explore CBDC’s potential design trade-offs of various technological infrastructures and examine consumer privacy implications and the potential for increased financial inclusion.

Current State of CBDCs in the U.S.

The Fed has played a lead role in the research of a potential U.S.-issued CBDC. Fed Governor Lael Brainard credits four growing developments with CBDCs: “the growing role of digital private money, the migration to digital payments, plans for the use of foreign CBDCs in cross-border payments, and concerns about financial exclusion.” Although in late 2019, the Fed stated that it was not developing a CBDC but would be analyzing potential benefits and costs as well as legal issues, by August 2020, the Fed announced two initiatives to explore the technical challenges of supporting a CBDC.

Project Hamilton, announced in 2020, is a multi-year collaboration between the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to code and test new technologies that could support the speed, security, privacy, and resiliency required of a hypothetical CBDC. Project Hamilton plans to release a white paper update in the third quarter of 2021 on any hypothetical digital currency platform, with any computer code utilized in the research to be released under an open source license. This open source license will allow the public to engage, review, and modify the experimental research software used in creating a possible CBDC. This research will also include a comparative analysis of existing and developmental private-sector and open source platforms.10