The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), which is now included on the list of nations that seek to launch an in-house central bank digital currency (CBDC), has published a white paper describing an exhaustive strategy for executing a pilot project for electronic Australian dollars (eAUD) and has done so in order to join the group of countries that aspire to do so.
The Bank has just released a white paper titled “Australian CBDC Pilot for Digital Finance Innovation.” This paper provides a more in-depth explanation of the project’s goals and methodology, including the design of the pilot CBDC that industry participants will use to investigate different use cases for a CBDC. The paper was published today.
Participants in the Australian economy and financial system who are interested in using CBDC are encouraged to submit suggestions on use cases for CBDC that have the potential to offer advantages to the running of the economy and the system. Participants have the option of indicating their interest in running their use case as part of a pilot project in order to test and demonstrate the value proposition.
For the time being, this pilot will only include Australian registered companies and verified individuals chosen by those distributors as participants in the distribution of the token. During the test period, the value of one CBDC eAUD will be comparable to the same number of Australian dollars.
The RBA will start by issuing eAUD to a subset of distributors before making it available to verified end customers for testing. After using an eAUD, customers may return it to distributors, who can then cash it in at the RBA, for the equivalent number of U.S. dollars.
