BIS presents its anonymous CBDC project

The project has two prototypes, one with a greater emphasis on privacy, and the other on security

29.11.2023 - 15:10

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1 min

What’s new? The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub has presented its own project of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) called Tourbillon. BIS specialists created two prototypes of the coin: eCash 1.0 and eCash 2.0, the first one provides “unconditional payer anonymity,” and the second one is “more resilient” in terms of security. When creating them, specialists relied on the developments of the famous cryptographer David Chaum.

BIS report

What else is known? Within the Tourbillon project, BIS specialists aim to achieve complete anonymity of the sender of funds for all other parties, including sellers, central bank, and private banks, while preventing illegal transactions.

Under such a scheme, the seller can be identified by their servicing bank as well as the sender. In turn, the central bank cannot obtain personal payment data but is able to track the circulation of the asset in an aggregated format.

However, users must undergo a know your customer (KYC) procedure to access the asset through commercial banks. This is because banks serving sellers of goods and services are required to ensure that transactions are compliant with regulatory requirements, implementing measures to combat tax evasion as well as money laundering and terrorist financing.

The report concludes that Tourbillon can be easily integrated into the payments landscape as the asset utilizes existing technologies including QR codes and protocols with the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.

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