The Federal Reserve Board continues to research a central bank digital currency (CBDC), or at least adjacent technologies, Vice Chair Michael Barr said on Oct. 27. He also touched on stablecoins at the Economics of Payments XII Conference, where his English colleague Sir Jon Cunliffe made his last speech as deputy governor of the Bank of England (BOE).
The Fed’s research is currently focused on “end-to-end system architecture,” such as ledgers and tokenization and custody models for an intermediated CBDC, Barr said in Washington. Barr repeated the Fed mantra of no digital dollar without a congressional mandate, but added that “learning from both domestic and international experimentation can aid decisionmakers in understanding how we can best support responsible innovation.”