Central Bank of Ireland Governor Talks Crypto, Praises Secure, Decentralized Technology – Fintech Bitcoin News

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Gabriel Makhlouf, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI), posted a blog post in which he shares his take on the digitization of finance. While echoing concerns expressed by his counterparts about cryptocurrencies, the official also highlighted some of their positives.

Don’t ignore the positives of crypto technology, says central bank governor

The article titled “Digital Money” was published on the bank’s website on Thursday. In the post, Gabriel Makhlouf discusses the project to issue a digital version of the common European currency. The European Central Bank (ECB) recently launched its “investigation phase” and although a final decision remains to be taken, the governor believes that it is not a question of “if” but rather “how and when” “a digital euro will be introduced.

The Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, Gabriel Makhlouf. Source: CBI

In addition to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Makhlouf is interested in the rise of decentralized money as a factor in the increasing digitization of finance. By avoiding the “misleading descriptor”, “cryptocurrencies” and “less inaccurate” “crypto-assets”, the banker simply calls coins, stablecoins and tokens “crypto”.

“The risks increase as individuals consider putting some of their money in crypto,” said Gabriel Makhlouf, listing the lack of transparency, price volatility, high power consumption and exposure to the fraud among the threats facing investors and governments. “As it stands, the downsides surrounding crypto far outweigh the pros,” the Irish official concludes. However, he also insists that authorities should not ignore the positives in the underlying technology of the cryptocurrency. The governor of the CBI notes:

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is essentially a secure, decentralized record of information stored on a network and is a key part of the architecture of certain types of cryptography.

Makhlouf points out that DLT can reduce the costs of financial transactions and eliminate middlemen in some cases, while praising the opportunity to issue smart contracts. “The use of DLT has increased in recent years – it certainly has potential – although it remains to be seen how widespread it will be,” adds the governor.

The importance of DLT is likely to increase as governments around the world examine options for using blockchain technology in the design of their digital currencies. A recent experiment with the participation of several central banks in the euro area and the ECB indicated that a blockchain-based digital euro would be highly scalable. The tested CBDC system was able to simultaneously process more than 300,000 transactions per second, the central bank of Estonia revealed earlier this week.

Do you expect most central bank digital currencies to be based on digital ledger technologies? Let us know in the comments section below.

Tags in this story Bank, Blockchain, blockchain technology, CBDC, cbi, Central Bank, Central Bank of Ireland, Coins, Crypto, Crypto Assets, Cryptocurrencies, Cryptocurrency, Digital Currency, Digital Euro, Distributed Ledger , DLT, Ireland, Irish, positive, risks, technology, Tokens

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