CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) has been the talk of town. Many sovereign governments and their central banks across the globe have been exploring the essence and the opportunities of CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) foreseeing a swift transformation phase in the prevailing finance system.

The advanced era of FinTech has come up with the new trends and inventions, such as, Smart contracts & DeFi which seem to be lucrative prospects and is most likely to hit the financial avenue by endorsing luring use cases of digital assets that enables flexibility, controllability of the financial as well as real assets, efficient trade finance & loans business and offer interest-bearing contracts etc.

For now, MIT’s Crypto and DLT research group, which happens to be the Digital Currency Initiative, illustrated that a CBDC in the recent past, and will utilise the technological and conceptual matters for the experimentation of crypto space.

The MIT group emphasized in a descriptive report, that CBDC should not be a replication of the prevailing cryptocurrency concept with the precise and similar design and features but there are things we can learn from their emergence and the usefulness of programmability in money and the importance of preserving user privacy.

In addition, MIT crypto-economics is also in place, the prime objective of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab is to encourage the research frontier in the evolving gamut of cryptoeconomics, where it blends the intricacies of computer science and economics to analyse the decentralized marketplaces and their applications that could be deployed by integrating cryptography with the economic incentives.

Elsewhere, Hong Kong and Thailand have begun to pilot a joint central bank digital currency (CBDC) for cross-border payments. As per the official press release, the HKMA (Hong Kong Monetary Authority) and the BoT (Bank of Thailand) have jointly made an announcements on the outcomes of a joint Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) research project named ‘Inthanon-LionRock’, under which both the financial institutions have started analysing the significance of CBDC to leverage cross-border payments in their respective regions.