Kansas City Fed President Esther George said Monday that the Federal Reserve is continuing its research on central bank-issued digital currencies, but that there are no plans at the moment to actually launch one in the U.S.
“I think it’s prudent that we do our homework and think about what that entails,” George told Yahoo Finance at the Sibos conference organized by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Intermediation (SWIFT).
For the last few years, the Fed has been conducting “in-house experiments” on the use cases for distributed ledger platforms. But the central bank is now extending its research by looping in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to actually build and test a hypothetical digital currency.
Fed Governor Lael Brainard, who has headed efforts on central bank digital currencies alongside George, said in August that their interest is focused on the “opportunities and limitations of possible technologies.”
