This Monday, the 6th, the Central Bank took the next step in the development process of Real Digital, updating the guidelines that guide the project and bringing new details about its next stage, of carrying out tests with a pilot version. To EXAME, specialists assess that the announcement highlights Brazil’s leading role in the field in the world.
Among the news reported by the municipality is the choice of Hyperledger Besu as the network on which the tests will be carried out. It is a DLT (“Distributed Ledger Technology” or distributed ledger technology, in free translation) connected to the Ethereum blockchain that works as a kind of hybrid, allowing the recording of transactions both in the public network and in a private, permissioned, network of Restricted access.
For Dan Yamamura, founding partner of Fuse Capital, the announcement highlighted the autarchy’s focus on bringing some technical news about the development of Real Digital, but he believes that the choice itself “does not affect in more macro terms where Real Digital will and the uses it will have”.
According to the Central Bank, the objective is for the Brazilian CBDC to be a kind of “Financial Services Pix”, allowing and making it simpler to carry out negotiations and access to services and going beyond making instant payments, something that already it is possible in Brazil but it is still being discussed in other countries that plan to launch their own CBDCs.
For this reason, the new testing phase of Real Digital involves a specific simulation: the negotiation of a National Treasury bond between two users with accounts at different banks, from a digital environment. With this, the network would have three types of digital assets: the Digital Real for transactions between banks, a Tokenized Real, backed by bank accounts, for retail, and tokenized Government Bonds.
Yamamura explains that “Real Digital could be a threat to banks in terms of issuing currency, but it will not be. The ability to generate currency will be linked to some currency at the real level, mainly in retail and wholesale, then yes it is currency creation, but it is already the relationship that exists in the current currency. The BC emphasized that it does not want to take away the power to create currency, which is the role of banks. Every real that goes to retail is a token backed by deposits” .
“Real Digital allows you to execute programmable functions within a smart contract, and from it you can transmit currency without having to connect with the traditional world”, he says. The Fuse partner also points out that the use of government bonds will bring another innovation: their digitization. With that, “in a digital wallet, you will be able to load them as well as any other digital asset, such as bitcoin, ether, solana”.
Another point highlighted by Yamamura is the additional security that the Brazilian CBDC should bring, with a focus on carrying out person-to-person transactions involving financial market products, a novelty and disintermediation in relation to the current logic. The measure brings “”infinite possibilities”, and he believes that it will enable the creation of “a series of products from there”.
In this sense, the Brazilian CBDC should help expand the scope of tools in the Brazilian banking system, which is already sophisticated, according to João Kamradt, director of research and investments at Viden Ventures. He expects the project to bring an “immense variety of new services, such as the fractionalization of certain assets that until then did not have such a feasible possibility and greater programmability of money”.
“When we talk about programmable money, we mean ways of transacting money that can only be made after fulfilling a certain number of demands that need to be met. All of this is supervised by the rules of the Brazilian government”, he explains. It will be possible, for example, to link payments to the receipt of a product, or offer discounts depending on the date on which the transaction takes place.
He assesses that “one thing is a fact: Real Digital will be safe, so much so that it is going through a series of steps to guarantee its security, such as tests in a simulated environment, without involving transactions or real values”. For Kamradt, the digital asset could be “an efficient and regulated bridge to facilitate the adoption of the services offered by the Web3 by the population. serve as a reference for digital currencies from other countries”.
Bernardo Srur, director-president of the Brazilian Association of Cryptoeconomics (ABCripto), assesses that the Real Digital project will already rely on the lessons learned throughout the creation of Pix and will have its own forum for dialogue, which will bring “power with society, in dialogue with really relevant market players in order to mitigate possible problems related to technology”.
He classifies this Monday’s announcement as a “great advance”, since Real Digital “puts Brazil on another level, ahead of several other countries in the world”. For him, with the announcement, the country “in fact takes the lead in terms of innovation. The BC again brings to society not only the regulatory power, but a lot of innovation and the introduction of new technologies that will help to have an even more efficient, safe and democratic”.
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