• The list of banks that are developing their own digital coin is growing.
• While Turkey will be lanching its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) next year, China could be the real game-changer.

A new list of central banks developing a digital coin reflects the current progress of the race for the second CDBC, after Venezuela. The list was published by the news portal The Block.

List of banks that are developing a digital coin

As it can be seen in the list below, there is a distinction between projects that make or will make use of a blockchain for their development. The most popular platform for this is Corda from the company R3. Other platforms such as NEM, NZIA, Hyperledger Iroha, among others, are on the list. In addition, almost all projects are in their pre-launch, test or development phase.

The central banks that are developing a CBDC are the following:

• Central Bank of Tunisia
• People’s Bank of China
• Central Bank of the Western African States
• Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden)
• Central Bank of Venezuela
• Central Bank of Uruguay
• Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey
• Central Bank of Iran
• Central Bank of Europe
• National Bank of Cambodia
• Bank of the Marshall Islands
• Central Bank of the Bahamas

The Petro is one of the CBDCs that have attracted the most attention in last year. The Venezuelan digital coin has been in development for almost two years and the government seems to be trying to promote its use among the population. Recently it became known that the government of the Latin American country will pay retirees and pensioners 0.5 PTR in December.

However, the Petro cannot be bought, spent and it is difficult to determine its value. Therefore, Venezuela still has a high volume of trade with Bitcoin on the exchange platform LocalBitcoins. As a digital coin, the Petro has been unsuccessful.

From the list, the E-Krona CBDC in Sweden was a project disputed by many major industry players. The Swedish Central Bank Riksbank announced a competition in which more than 50 companies participated. IOTA and Stellar Lumens were also among the applicants. Finally the project ended with the Irish company Accenture.

The European Union also published a recent report entitled “Exploring anonymity in central bank digital currencies”. There it sets out the first steps taken by its project, EUROChain. The project will be developed by the European Central Bank and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB).

The project will seek to find a balance between allowing a certain level of privacy for electronic payments and maintaining compliance with regulations. However, it has already received severe criticism for the transaction system that will allow a government representative and a regulator to be present in a transaction in addition to the sender and receiver. The European Central Bank says that this will not prevent transactions from being private.

One of the big absentees from the list is the United States. In a letter to Congress, a representative of the Federal Reserve explained that it is unnecessary for the Federal Reserve to develop a CBDC. However, they are keeping an eye on developments in this area.

Projects from Russia, Turkey, Uruguay, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Iran may be equally interesting. But perhaps the launch of the digital Yuan will be profiled as the strongest of the competitors.

China emerges as the strongest competitor

The Asian giant has been setting the stage for the launch of its CBDC. The test of the digital Yuan, which will take place soon, is one of the most awaited events in crypto space. Due to the high population and its economic development, China could cause changes to the ecosystem that will affect the performance of the crypto market.

Besides this project, Facebook Libra is probably the most watched digital coin developed by a centralized and private company. Although Libra’s launch has been halted, the Libra’s test network has recorded 50,000 transactions and the Libra development team has published a roadmap that will guide it over the next year.

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