The discussion of digital assets now heavily emphasizes central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. Also, some countries are starting beta rollouts for the development of the financial industry as other countries decide whether or not to start developing such assets.

According to Reuters, Brazil’s central bank has officially launched its experimental CBDC. Specifically, the bank has announced the launch of its digital current pilot project seeking to emulate the success shown by the instant payment system, Pix, according to the report.

By the end of 2024, according to Fabio Araujo, the Project Coordinator for the bank’s CBDC initiative, the CBDC should be used by the general population. As per a recent statement, a testing phase will be followed by a review of user feedback before that adoption happens.

The report also noted Araujo’s statement that the experiment, is built as a payment option on distributed ledger technology (DLT), to support the provision of retail financial services settled through tokenized deposits in institutions of the financial and payment systems in Brazil.

Araujo stated, “This environment reduces costs and brings the possibility of financial inclusion for all people. You have services that are very expensive to carry out, such as repo operations, which are only for banks, but which would be performed by anyone with technology based on digital currencies.”

He added, “This could reduce the cost of credit, the cost of improving the return on investments. There is a great potential for new service providers, FinTechs, democratizing access to the market and offering new services.” 

Conclusively, he noted, “Banks are very interested in this new tokenized world, in every conversation we have they have shown a lot of interest.”