At a BIS event, the Central Bank of Chile announced that it is delaying its planned digital roll out to undertake further work on the benefits and risks.

The Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware Act (ECASH) has been introduced in the US Congress by Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat and chair of the House Task Force on Financial Technology. The bill directs the US Treasury Department to conduct a pilot program for a version of digital dollars that work just like cash in that they would be stored on hardware, not in bank accounts.

In preparation for a meeting of emerging market economy Deputy Governors organised by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the BIS surveyed 26 central banks and received papers relating to their CBDC work from 24 of them.

The Digital Currency Conference (DCC) took place in person immediately after the Banknote & Currency Conference in February. The agenda raced through a wide range of topics, including quantum computing, achieving privacy with CBDCs, the Digital Dollar Project, and digital currencies.

The Deputy Governor of the Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) has said it is on track to launch its CBDC in the first quarter of 2022, having completed the pilot in December 2021. At the moment, it is working to increase the number of commercial banks capable and ready to open accounts for CBDC users.

The Beijing Winter Olympics has seen a third payment option be used at an Olympic Games for the first time since 1986 (when Visa got became the exclusive payment service provider alongside cash).

The CBDC Conference will take place in Frankfurt 29-31 August 2022. Registration is open and there is a super saver 25% discount rate for those who register by 30 April – www.cbdc-conference.com.

The UK’s second parliamentary chamber, the House of Lords, has reviewed the work of the Bank of England and Her Majesty’s Treasury Taskforce that is working on the potential for introducing a retail Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the UK.

The Banque de France, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub have completed a cross-border wholesale CBDC experiment. Known as Project Jura, the experiment used tokenised assets on a distributed ledger (DLT) platform to settle cross-border transactions.

The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructure carried out a survey of central banks in Latin America and the Caribbean asking about their work on CBDCs on behalf of the Bank for International Settlements.