Accenture and Digital Dollar Foundation to trial United States CBDC this year

By
Cointelegraph By Martin Young
-
0
148

The Fortune 500 Accenture company has teamed up with the Digital Dollar Fund to conduct tests of Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, in the United States.

Announced on Monday, May 3, the newly created Digital Dollar Project will take effect five CBDC pilot programs over the next 12 months. The goal of the project is to generate data to inform U.S. policymakers on how to develop a domestic digital currency.

The Digital Dollar Project will launch three pilot programs in the next two months, generating data on the functional, sociological, and business benefits of digital dollar dollars.

Al Jazeera reports that former chairman of the Business Futures Trading Commission and co-founder of the Digital Dollar Foundation, Christopher Giancarlo, highlighted the lack of U.S. data on CBDC:

“There are conferences and articles appearing weekly around the world on CBDCs based on data from other countries. What doesn’t exist is real U.S. data and tests to inform that debate. We aim to generate that real-world data.”

The Fed added the cautious approach as a guardian of the world’s reserve currency, President Jerome Powell responded that it is far more important to get a digital dollar than fast.

Giancarlo countered that Powell is right to be cautious, but warned that the U.S. could stay further back while China pushes its own CBDC testing and deployment.

While the U.S. Federal Reserve System is exploring the technology and demands of CBDC, the U.S. is lagging behind the digital currency initiatives currently in many other jurisdictions.

China’s central bank and major state-owned banks are recently preparing to test the digital yuan for a shopping festival on May 5th.

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.

According to a study by the Bank for International Settlements, 80% of the world’s central banks are already researching digital currencies issued by a central bank.