The Bank of Korea (BOK) is to review additional central bank digital currency (CBDC) design options after its 10-month experiment to test a retail CBDC based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) revealed “limitations of scalability” such as slow processing times during periods of high transaction volume when compared with a more conventional centralised ledger database, the bank says... More
Turkey is planning to launch a central bank digital currency (CBDC) that will be integrated with the country’s digital identity system and the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey’s FAST instant payments service... More
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has unveiled a prototype two-tier central bank digital currency (CBDC) ecosystem that will enable end users to store digital HK dollars as either intermediated CBDC tokens or CBDC-backed stablecoins in a digital wallet and use them to carry out retail transactions... More
Residents of South Korea will soon be able to store a digital ID in an app on their mobile phone and use it to verify their identity across a wide range of use cases including accessing government services, healthcare, finance and transport... More
Japanese collectible toy maker Medicom Toy has added NFC authentication tags to three of its [email protected] figurines in a bid to combat numerous fake versions of the bear-shaped toys that have appeared on the market... More
Sweden’s central bank The Riksbank has completed the second phase of its e-krona central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot and demonstrated that the blockchain-based technical solution it is testing can be integrated into existing banking and payments infrastructure... More
Music fans, investors and collectors who purchase exclusive limited edition vinyl albums released by US company Vinylkey can authenticate their purchase, register proof of ownership and link to unique digital assets by tapping an NFC tag embedded in the physical album with their smartphone... More
Around 100 countries are now exploring the potential development and issuance of a central bank digital currency (CBDC), and the challenges and opportunities identified by these research projects reveal a need for “increased international information-sharing of insights learned”, according to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) report... More
Nearly 20% of all in-person Visa card transactions in the US are now contactless, with that proportion rising to more than 25% in Los Angeles, Detroit, Orange County, Miami and Salt Lake City, over 30% in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, and reaching 45% in New York, according to the card network’s Q1 2022 earnings call... More
South Korea’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety and the Korean National Police Agency have begun trialling a mobile driving licence prior to a national rollout and as a first step towards the introduction of other state-issued digital ID documents... More
One in two in-person transactions authorised, cleared and settled through Mastercard’s payment processing services worldwide during Q4 2021 were contactless, up from “approximately” one in three in the period prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, according to figures revealed at the card network’s Q4 earnings call... More
The US Federal Reserve has published a study examining the potential benefits and risks of issuing an American central bank digital currency (CBDC) as the first step in a public consultation on the possible future issuance of a digital dollar... More
More than nine in 10 consumers in Nigeria (91%) and six in 10 consumers in Indonesia (60%) would be likely to use a central bank digital currency (CBDC) compared with less than 24% in the US and 14% in Germany, according to a report by Giesecke+Devrient and the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF)... More
Japanese payments network JCB has demonstrated a machine-to-machine payments infrastructure that enables merchants to conditionally accept NFC payments even when both purchaser and merchant are offline... More
Emirates Post Group is issuing a set of four “crypto stamps” in both physical and blockchain-enabled digital form that purchasers can authenticate by scanning an NFC chip embedded in the physical version with their smartphone... More
A consortium of more than 70 leading banks, financial services providers and other businesses in Japan is to conduct a series of proof of concept (PoC) trials of a digital currency supported by commercial banks across a range of specific use cases with the aim of rolling the currency out by the end of the 2022 fiscal year... More
Consumers in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts in the US will soon be able to make in-store and online purchases and carry out person-to-person transactions using a digital version of the BerkShares local currency... More
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has published a white paper that explores potential technical and design options for issuing and distributing retail central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and proposes a two-tier system as “one possible design” for a digital HK dollar or e-HKD... More
More than 488,000 consumers in Nigeria have downloaded an eNaira digital wallet and conducted transactions worth a total of 62m naira (US$151,000) in the country’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) since its launch in October, according to a Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) spokesman... More
The total number of personal and corporate digital yuan wallets issued in China has risen from 24.5m in July to 140m as of October, an increase of nearly 600%, the People’s Bank of China’s Mu Changchun has revealed... More
