The Bank of Canada took a significant step in exploring the technical feasibility of a digital Canadian dollar, proposing a specific system designed for a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) focused on simple, everyday payments, according to a new research paper.
The central bank’s research team examined OpenCBDC 2PC, a model developed in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Currency Initiative. This design prioritizes privacy, speed and decentralization by allowing users to hold digital funds directly, much like digital cash.
The new research comes after the Bank of Canada said it is shifting its focus away from a retail CBDC last year, saying that it was prepared if the people of the nation decide such a product is needed in the future.
Privacy issues
A major focus of the report is privacy, which isn't a big surprise because CBDCs have sparked debate around the world, in part on concerns they could enable state surveillance of financial activity. Unlike cash, which is anonymous, a CBDC could theoretically allow a central authority to track every transaction.
The report suggested that the system separates personal identity from transaction data, allowing non-registered users to hold funds in self-custodied wallets. The users could then transact without sharing their identity with a bank or payment processor. Even for registered users, the central bank would not have access to identifying information or transaction histories.
The report goes further, proposing enhanced protection by potentially using cryptographic techniques such as zero-knowledge proofs to obscure transaction amounts from the core infrastructure. These features collectively offer a level of privacy that the authors say could exceed that of current electronic payment systems.
Bitcoin-like structure
In contrast to traditional banking systems, where money is stored in user accounts, the report suggests a design that uses "unspent transaction outputs" (UTXOs) — a structure more commonly associated with Bitcoin.
The system processes transactions in two steps: updating a core ledger and transferring funds from one user’s wallet to another. This approach supports real-time settlement and offers a higher degree of privacy from both banks and government institutions.
Challenges
While the report lays out a detailed technical solution to a potential digital Canadian dollar, it also identifies potential hurdles.
One of the main hurdles is that integrating the proposed architecture with existing retail payment infrastructure could require substantial technical upgrades, including in the way point-of-sale terminals handle digital cash-like transfers.
Additionally, while the system is scalable in theory, performance dips during audits and system recovery operations need further engineering work to meet production-grade standards.
The paper clearly states that this is not a commitment to launch a CBDC. However, the findings lay out a concrete technical foundation for what such a system could look like— one that balances user privacy, institutional control, and operational resilience.
Whether the central bank will implement it remains a question, given the controversy surrounding CBDC. However, the timing of the report could be right as Canada's new prime minister, Mark Carney, was quoted in his 2021 book as a supporter of CBDCs.
"The most likely future of money is a central bank stablecoin, known as a central bank digital currency or CBDC,” he wrote in his book.
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