At this time, numerous initiatives are attempting to provide citizens with a digital form of central bank money, referred to as Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). CBDC promises many benefits for citizens, such as providing a risk-free means of payment, preserving monetary sovereignty in light of the growing usage of private cryptocurrencies, and strengthening the transmission of monetary policy. The central banks of Sweden and China recently started the pilot phase of their CBDC prototypes and are expected to issue CBDC to the broad public in the near future. Furthermore, there are countries where some kind of CBDC is already issued with the help of e-money providers. In El Salvador, for example, providers have been issuing e-money to the broad public since 2015, which is fully backed by central bank money. A similar case can be found in China where e-money providers like Alibaba (Alipay) and Tencent (WeChat Pay) have been required to back their e-money with central bank money since spring 2019. In Lithuania, backing e-money with central bank money is voluntary but is still used in practice.
Continue read: https://sites.law.duke.edu/thefinregblog/2020/08/28/regulating-central-bank-digital-currencies-towards-a-conceptual-framework/
