Bank Of Japan Will Start Digital Currency Proof-Of-Concept In 2021

A recent document shows that the Bank of Japan will start its new cryptocurrency proof-of-concept project in 2021, and the central bank further stressed the need for offline availability.

In collaboration with a group of seven central banks, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published its first joint report into central bank digital currencies on October 9, and with that started focusing on the foundational principles and core features of CBDCs.

Along with the report, the Bank of Japan released a document that outlines its own specific approach to CBDCs from a Japan-based perspective. The report shows that Bank of Japan will start the new project with first of several testing phases for its own CBDC sometime in 2021. This will include the development of a test environment for the currency and experiments on the basement functions as a payment instrument.

“Offline use in times of system and network failures as well as electrical outages is also important for Japan, given the frequent occurrence of natural disasters,” the BOJ report shows.

In the other crypto regulation news, we can see that Japan is prone to a wide range of natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, cyclones and volcanic eruptions) which is why resilience should be a core feature.

While the Bank of Japan will start adopting this, the report gives no details at all about how providing against such events might be achieved, even though there are solutions that address the potential electrical or network failures for Bitcoin (BTC) as well as other blockchain based cryptocurrencies.

These mostly include the development of mesh networks which are centered around long-wave radio transmitters, as well as Blockstream’s satellite network which will broadcast Bitcoin transactions via space.

For those of you who don’t know or did not read the cryptocurrency news about Japan, the BIS digital currency group was established as a research group in January 2020, and included a lot of central banks from countries like Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland and the European Central Bank.The United States Federal Reserve also joined the group, which proved that they aim on doing something but also are a serious strategic player when it comes to regulation.