The Australia central bank, which has been exploring the benefits of central bank digital currency (CBDC), recently announced the digital currency’s proposed use cases as well as the names of providers “invited to participate in the live pilot.” In a press statement, the bank, which is known as the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), said the chosen use cases were selected from a large number of submissions from industry participants.
Brad Jones, an assistant governor at the RBA, is quoted in the statement lauding the industry participants’ willingness to engage regulators. Jones said:
We are delighted with the enthusiastic engagement by industry in this important research project. It has also been encouraging that the use case providers that have been invited to participate in the pilot span a wide range of entities in the Australian financial system, from smaller fintechs to large financial institutions.
According to Jones, the pilot, as well as the more comprehensive study, will be conducted in parallel to serve two ends. The first of these ends is helping the industry gain some “hands-on learning” experience. Bolstering policymakers’ understanding of “how a CBDC could potentially benefit the Australian financial system and economy
For his part, Dilip Rao, a CBDC program director with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre (DFCRC), said the process of validating use cases with industry participants and regulators is important because it will likely “inform further research into design considerations for a CBDC that could potentially play a role in a tokenized economy.”
Meanwhile, some of the use cases chosen by the RBA include offline payments, corporate bond payments, and funds custody.