Reports say that England’s central bank has started hiring people to work on its digital currency.
A report from the Times on Saturday, April 8, said that the Bank of England (BOE) wants to put together a team of up to 30 people to run its central bank digital currency (CBDC) project.
“A team of 30 seems like quite a significant resource to focus on the digital pound,” Ian Taylor, an adviser to the trade association CryptoUK, told the Times. “It shows the impact it would have, and that the bank are serious about it.”
There are openings for a “digital pound solutions architect” and a “digital pound security architect” on the BOE website. Both of these jobs were added in the last week of March.
Treasury was looking into whether or not an official digital currency could be made by 2030.
The currency, called “Britcoin” and also called “digital sterling” or “digital pound,” would be issued by the Bank of England and backed by the government.
“At this stage, we judge it likely that the digital pound will be needed in the future. It is too early to decide whether to introduce the digital pound, but we are convinced preparatory work is justified,” the two entities said in their consultation paper.
“Programmability has been pegged as one of the major draws of digital currencies and one of innovative services that central bank digital currency could help facilitate,” we wrote.
“But there is a distinction to be made between programmable payments — setting predefined terms for a payment to be initiated — and programmable money.”
In the EU, for example, the European Central Bank (ECB) has ruled out the possibility of the regional CBDC becoming the latter, which would force the ECB to limit where, when, or to whom digital currency payments can be made.
Martin Hargreaves, the chief product officer at Quant, agrees with this move. He said that restrictions on the movement of money can hurt the use and adoption of CBDC.
“When you start to place restrictions on money, you affect its value. So, if I’ve got £100 but I can only spend it on rent or groceries, that’s not worth the same to me as £100 that I can spend on anything,” Hargreaves said.
When asked about the digital pound in particular, he said that there are ways to give the currency the benefits of being programmable.
For example, the U.K. and other countries considering CBDCs can use digital currencies to limit the control that Big Tech companies, major card networks, acquirers, and payment networks have over how, when, and to whom consumers pay.
