• BitcoinbitbitbbiThe war of CBDC vs crypto is picking up fast amid the ongoing crypto winter and crisis in the market.
• We have covered three digital assets that hold the potential to challenge CBDCs and centralized systems.

With the current turn of events in the crypto space, regulators are like to launch an all-out war with decentralized digital assets and cryptocurrencies. As market participation in public cryptocurrencies is on a decline, governments and central banks will take this opportunity to push CBDCs into the market.

The latest report from Ripple shows that nearly 50% of the world’s population will use digital wallets for transactions by 2024. It is clear that we are likely to see some major shifts in the currency market over the next decade.

Also, crypto market crashes have been seen in the past as well and some of the key projects like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others, have managed to sail through those tough times. With every passing year, the decentralized systems continue to improve further and in all certainty, they look capable enough to be challenging the existing infrastructure as well as upcoming projects like CBDCs.

Today we will be discussing three such digital assets which hold the potential to tackle SWIFT, CBDC’s, etc. and serve the global population.

Bitcoin (BTC)

The premise behind creating Bitcoin was itself to break free from the centralized banking systems. The world’s largest cryptocurrency has done a fairly good job to ignite the demand for the use of decentralized money.

Bitcoin has also emerged as one of the most trusted digital assets among retail as well as institutional players. However, Bitcoin has rather been a preferred choice of investment instead of a payment method. With its strong price appreciation over the last decade, investors also see it to be more suitable as a store of value.

Also, scalability becomes a major question if 8 billion people in the world have to use Bitcoin. The average transaction time for Bitcoin is still 10 minutes which makes it not ideal for daily payments. Of course, developments like the Lightning Network are in the making, but we have yet to see anything concrete so far.

The ECB recently lashed out at Bitcoin saying it’s on the road to irrelevance. However, this is an extreme case prediction and we certainly cannot expect a central bank to sing praises about Bitcoin.

Ethereum (ETH)

The world’s second-largest crypto platform recently transitioned to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system giving itself a massive scalability boost. Considering that Ethereum hosts a large part of the crypto ecosystem such as smart contracts, DApps, DeFi, etc. It might seem to be ideal to host global transactions.

However, we are still in the pretty early stages of Ethereum 2.0 development. We have yet to see the implementation of core concepts like Ethereum Plasma and Ethereum Sharding which would unleash the true power of scalability.

Stellar Lumens (XLM)

The Stellar Lumens blockchain ecosystem has been a bit of an underdog in the entire crypto space. This year, we have seen Stellar making some serious efforts to push network growth and usability. The good thing about Stellar is its ability to scale and that it is ISO20020022 compatible. The Stellar blockchain network can process up to 5,000 transactions per second which make it suitable over its other peers for daily payments.

Recently, Brazil’s top cryptocurrency exchange Mercado Bitcoin (MB) launched its stablecoin MRBL on the Stellar blockchain network. On the other hand, a Stellar-based marketplace GetPaid is improving the earning prospects of billions of freelancers, creators, and traders in Africa.

Amid the current crisis with Russia, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has released an update on the country’s plans to launch a central bank digital currency (CBDC) which will rest atop the Stellar blockchain.