Accenture has teamed up with Digital Dollar Foundation to conduct Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) trials in the United States.
It has been reported that the newly formed Digital Dollar Project will carry out five CBDC pilot programs over the next 12 months. The project’s objective is to generate data to inform US policymakers on how to develop a domestic digital currency.
However, the Digital Dollar Project will launch three pilot programs in the next two months, generating data on the functional, sociological, and business benefits of a digital greenback.
Christopher Giancarlo, the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and co-founder of the Digital Dollar Foundation, said:
“There are conferences and papers coming out every week around the world on CBDCs based on data from other countries. What there is not, is any real data and testing from the United States to inform that debate. We’re seeking to generate that real-world data.”
Likewise, the Fed is taking a cautious approach as the guardian of the world’s reserve currency, the report added, with chairman Jerome Powell responding that it is far more important to get a digital dollar right than it is to be fast. Giancarlo countered that Powell was correct to be cautious, but warned that the US could fall further behind as China pushes ahead with its own CBDC testing and deployment.
Former CFTC chief Christopher Giancarlo and Fortune 500 firm Accenture are teaming up to pilot a U.S. digital currency. https://t.co/4TqOGW8DQG — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) May 4, 2021
While the US Federal Reserve has been conducting research into the technology and applications for a CBDC, the United States lags behind the digital currency initiatives currently ongoing in numerous other jurisdictions.
Thus, Accenture has also worked on a number of CBDC projects in other countries, including Canada, Singapore, France, and Sweden, which has already completed the first phase of its pilot.
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Intelligent HQ