Review of Whitepaper on CBDC

Owned by Vipin Bharathan
Last updated: Dec 04, 2020
2 min read

Discuss whitepaper on CBDC sparked by the eThaler project. The authors are Mani Pillai (otc*Digital & Vipin Bharathan dlt.nyc and advisor to otc.Digital), eThaler received a lot of interest in the press and in many other venues, including among central bankers. There will be a demo of eThaler at a later meeting. The whitepaper is still in draft. Please read it (or skim it as it is a 36 page paper) and we are eager to hear your comments for improvement. The paper was sent out as an attachment to the group. A new direction in the implementation of an integrated CBDC solution is proposed in the whitepaper. The whitepaper is not just words, implementation of some of the components are available in hyperledger labs and elsewhere. We hope to change the conversation around CBDC towards open standards and open source.

The draft version of the paper is available. Please provide reviews and comments on the whitepaper below.


Review:

  1. @Daniel Schwartz - CDM is for derivatives and does not have much take-up what makes it relevant in this context? Further points that Daniel made...
    1. CDM is for OTC products (not identifiable products, i.e. one with cusips, etc) 
    2. CDM is also for longer term contracts (Not one day contracts) 
    3.  Answers:
      1. CDM extensions into EQD and FXO are no longer confined to OTC (See Mani's comment below: 

        CDM is now being adopted by multiple industry associations such as ISLA, ICMA and FinOS to address FX Options, Repos, Security Finance etc. )

      2. Longer term contracts using CDM can result in an economic event that can trigger payments on the CBDC or other payment networks. Having a product lifecycle contract (not message based instructions like ISO20022) can result in these economic events linked to multiple payments. CDM does not directly address payments.

Dual Networks:

The climate SIG  independently came up with the dual network idea: although in a different context and framework https://lf-hyperledger.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CASIG/Virtual+Community+Renewable+Energy+Network