The scope and potential of CBDCs: insights from CordaCon

It was great to be at CordaCon 2022 in London last week where I enjoyed several insightful conversations with fellow DLT & blockchain specialists!

I just wanted to share with you my main business takeaways from the two day event:

Key takeaways from CordaCon:

1. The crucial talking point was the scope and potential of CBDCs, with over 80% of central banks actively exploring some form of sovereign-backed crypto. While most blockchains are public ledgers, visible to all, Central Banks require transaction privacy and control over their currency, so will most likely create CBDCs on private ledgers that can also operate at significant scale. 75% of all money in circulation is commercial bank money, and ripe for tokenisation, so this will be a monumental undertaking!
   
   
2. Interoperability – the ability for a private ledger to connect with today’s global infrastructure as well as other CBDCs and other digital currencies – will be critical in driving institutional adoption of digital currencies. In fact, interoperability for cross-border payments was identified by many speakers as a major priority for CBDCs.
   
   
3. Digital assets / currencies will be on many networks and a variety of platforms. There is a strong onus on permissioned networks to help customers stay in control of their digital asset journey – across networks and regulatory zones. We saw how R3 is building interoperability into Corda 5 across two dimensions: firstly Corda-to-Corda (e.g. cross-chain swaps), and secondly Corda to other DLTs and other business orchestration layers (e.g. Corda-to-Ethereum escrow wrap).
   
   
4. Rising interest in stablecoins from banks and financial market infrastructures show that they can co-exist with CBDCs. R3 showcased their Stablecoin Accelerator, which allows users to fast-track the issue of a digital token that is pegged 1:1 with central bank reserves of commercial bank deposits.
   
   
5. Traditional financial firms and new entrants are building out a new secondary market infrastructure to support the tokenisation of securities as diverse as gold, syndicated loans, collateral, equities and bonds. Just like in the public blockchain space, this new infrastructure is 24/7, real-time, supports complex business logic, and broadens access to investors.
   
   
6. Corda 5, as a cluster of microservices, allows massive horizontal scaling, control through terraform and Kubernetes, and hopefully greater compatibility with existing systems and processes. We are excited to partner with R3 and our banking clients to bring new solutions to market, and see how the future roadmap evolves.