An analytic note from the Bank of Canada provides a detailed analysis of retail CBDC use cases. Representatives of the local regulator expect that over a third of Canadians will use cryptocurrencies by 2024.
More than 30% of Canadians plan to invest in crypto-assets by late 2023. The report was released by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC). Grant Vingoe, CEO of the OSC, said in a speech before the Economic Club of Canada that the regulator takes a neutral stance on cryptocurrencies.
The Canadian regulator views cryptocurrencies such as BTC and ETH as commodities, but various forms of tokenized relationships between trading platforms and investors are considered securities. The regulation of these asset groups applies accordingly. That said, the positive and negative characteristics of cryptocurrency assets and the technologies behind them don’t affect the OSC’s regulatory approach.
At the same time, Sriram Darbha, Analyst at the Bank of Canada, presented a research report on the opportunities for interoperability of retail CBDCs across states. He identified five key patterns repeated in the software designs of different retail digital currencies. The study’s author referred to the identified patterns as “archetypes.”
According to the expert, any hypothetical retail CBDC will correspond to one “archetype” or combine features of several of them. The system of “archetypes” allows central banks to design a digital currency considering their economic policy goals, unify CBDCs, and develop options for their future interaction.
Representatives of the Future of Payments Working Group (FoP) stated the need to consider the interoperability of different CBDC projects in advance back in July. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a group member, recently completed successful testing of a cross-border wholesale CBDC and launched a pilot project to test retail digital currency. Plus, SWIFT reported that it had achieved interoperability between different CBDCs within its existing infrastructure.
