This article is from www.blocknews.com.br and the original article can he read here in Portuguese
Roberto Campos Neto, president of BC.
The president of the Central Bank of Brazil (BC), Roberto Campos Neto, said today (11) that there may be a “small” delay in the development schedule of the digital real, due to the current strike by the institution’s employees. And he also said that if there is no more coordinated work by the world’s BCs for the institutions’ digital currency platforms to allow international transfers, then “cryptocurrency will always be more efficient”.
Campos Neto made the statements at an event held by TC, a platform for financial information and education. The testing of nine use cases of digital real was scheduled to start on the 27th and last four months, but this step is delayed. Afterwards, the initial forecast was that the pilot projects would start in the fourth quarter. Despite the delay, the BC president stated that the projects are maintained in the medium and long term.
The digital real is not the only activity that is lagging behind in BC. This week, the bank will not disclose any indicators. On March 17th, the servers started a slow operation, with outages during the day. And on April 1st, the strike began.
Campos Neto also said that he has been “looking a lot” at the metaverse, in which there is an “exponential growth of transactions”. Some financial institutions have already announced actions in this environment, which actually doesn’t even exist yet, but is under development. Banco do Brasil and ItaĂş already have activities in it.
According to the president of the BC, the world “is going to move towards a process of monetization of data, of ownership, of very intense divisibility in the coming years. We need to accompany this with the innovation of the national financial system”. Data monetization is one of the topics that are related to the so-called Web 3, which includes the use of blockchain, cryptocurrencies and greater user control over their data.
Campos Neto also said that the growth of cryptocurrencies as a means of payment was lower than inflation. But there is a curve for the use of cryptocurrencies “that starts as an investment (which is the biggest use in Brazil) and then becomes a means of payment”.
However, for him there is “an unfair concentration of the debate on cryptocurrencies itself and a lack of diagnosis on what the network is. More than the importance of cryptocurrency, it is the network on which it travels. This is where there is great progress. There are networks where the more you increase traffic, the better the network gets. Governments are looking at this and they need to have a digital form of their currency.”
BC currency will be stablecoin
Virtually every central bank in the world is studying CBDCs. “But there needs to be greater coordination,” said the president of the Brazilian BC. This is because “in some places it is a centralized platform, others are on blockchain”. And that’s when he said that if these BC digital currencies, such as the digital real, do not allow efficient international payments, “the cryptocurrency will always be more efficient”.
For him, this is a “healthy race” and there is room for both digital currency, crypto and stablecoin. In fact, the BC president recalled that the digital real will be in the form of a stablecoin (crypto linked to an asset, in this case, the real). And he explained how it works: “just as there is the STR (Reserve Transfer System), which liquidates all assets and is guaranteed the real, there will be a system on top of it, as if it were a digital STR”. In it, the guarantee is the digital real and banks will be able to issue stablecoins on top of deposits. “This is a way to digitize the currency without creating a break in bank balance sheets.”
The STR is what the BC calls the heart of the Brazilian Payments System (SPB). In it, the final settlements of the country’s financial operations take place. As with blockchain, it is not possible to undo an operation in STR. Just doing another one.
For Campos Neto, it is very difficult to regulate areas that have exponential growth. This is because it is very difficult to have visibility today of what the scenario will be in a few years. And he said he’s seen new protocols that could change the digital convergence he’d already imagined. And change for the better.