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Central banks are considering how retail central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) may help support financial inclusion. While they are not a magic bullet, central banks see CBDC as a further tool to promote financial inclusion if this goal features prominently in the design from the get-go. In particular, central banks are considering design options around promoting innovation in the two-tiered financial system (eg allowing for novel non-bank payment service providers), offering a robust and low-cost public sector technological basis (with novel interfaces and offline payments), facilitating enrolment and education (via simplified due diligence and electronic know your customer) and fostering interoperability (both domestically and across borders). Together, these features can address a range of existing barriers to financial inclusion.

The researchers from BIS and the World Bank identify common factors across nine central banks that face a variety of different challenges.

Privacy, security, and offline access present difficult problems

The South African Reserve Bank stated further work would be undertaken to study the findings from the project and used to inform policy and regulatory responses to DLT and CBDCs.

Fabio Panetta outlined recent findings and remaining challenges while emphasizing the necessity of a well-designed European CBDC.

Pilot CBDC can integrate into payments systems, but met potential AML and performance problems

Banks rarely become weak overnight, and flaws in business models and strategies are often the root causes of banks' vulnerabilities and failures. While sudden shocks may be the immediate cause of banks' demise, the root causes are generally more structural. If not identified in time and allowed to fester, these vulnerabilities will make a bank's activities increasingly unsustainable, to the point where it becomes non-viable.

The Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, said it completed the second phase of the e-krona test, known as the e-krona, ready to be integrated into the banking network and facilitate transactions.

The Swedish CBDC is now technically ready for integration with banks and payment service providers, according to a report from Riksbank.

The report by PwC shows that 80% of central banks are considering or have already launched a CBDC.

Beijing to trail use of central bank digital currency outside of Olympic Games centres

Yet another regulatory attack on self-hosted wallets, a digital dollar with privacy protections, and more of the same for spot BTC ETFs.

The Bank of Japan has warned G7 nations that a common regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies needs to be introduced quickly to discuss digital assets to be used to skirt sanctions.

Project Ellipse explores how technology solutions could enable supervision to be more forward-looking, insights-based and data-driven using an integrated regulatory data and analytics platform. The Ellipse prototype combines both structured and unstructured sources of data that are relevant to current events in real time. Advanced analytics are then applied to those integrated data sources to provide supervisors with early warning indicators, analytics and prudential metrics.

Kyrgyzstan has regulated the crypto exchanges and the mining industry, however, there are no laws governing the circulation of cryptocurrencies in the country.