The Central Bank of Brazil, Banco Central do Brasil (BACEN) announced that it has chosen nine projects to aid in the development of ‘Real Digital’, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
In Brief:
- There were 47 proposals from 43 different companies, out of which 9 were selected to take it forward for the central bank.
- The implementation phase will begin on March 28 and will last until July 27.
- Project partners like Bitcoin Market, Bitrust and CPqD, Aave, and Visa do Brasil are selected.
“The ‘Lift Challenge Real Digital’ selected 9 projects for monitoring, which represents about 20% of a total of 47 proposals submitted by 43 different companies,” the press release read. The selected projects’ implementation phase will begin on March 28 and will last until July 27.
The projects chosen from around the globe vary from companies including established banks, a DeFi protocol, and an important crypto exchange. Mercado Bitcoin, Santander Brasil, Bitcoin Market, Bitrust and CPqD, and Aave, and Visa do Brasil, are among the partners, the details released by Laboratory of Financial and Technological Innovations (LIFT).
It is an innovation lab co-managed by the central bank. It aims to research possible use cases for a digital Brazilian currency and the technical feasibility of various methods for getting there.
The selection process attempted to strike a balance between the diversity of the portfolio of proposals submitted to the laboratory and the need for detailed monitoring of the selected projects.
- Aave – An open-source liquidity pool that gathers resources from several savers (forming a liquidity pool) with a focus on offering loans using DeFi tools.
- Banco Santander Brasil – deals with Delivery vs. Payment (DvP) and tokenization.
- Febraban – Brazil’s banking federation, deals with DvP of financial assets.
- Giesecke + Devrient – German payment security companyhandles dual offline payments.
- Itaú Unibanco – Brazilian financial services company, handles international payments, using the Payment vs. Payment (PvP) method
- Bitcoin Market – deals with digital asset DvP, with a focus on crypto-assets.
- Tecban – an ATM network operator, presents a logistics solution for e-commerce based on IoT techniques.
- VERT – deals with rural financing based on a programmable tokenized asset with a value linked to the Real (Real stablecoin).
- Visa do Brasil – Looking at using a DeFi solution for financing small and medium-sized businesses.
Brazil is one of the top contenders in this race of crypto space. Brazil’s only stock exchange, B3, had been planning to enter the crypto market this year through crypto-as-a-service (CaaS).
When it comes to regulatory bodies, the reservations regarding cryptos have always been around since the time its popularity amongst the masses has increased. India has been contemplating its own CBDC for the past year. The Central Bank of India RBI had discussed various aspects related to CBDC and private cryptocurrencies citing the financial instability of the country.
