In the scope of the first-phase studies of the Digital Turkish Lira Project, conducted under the leadership of the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (CBRT), the first payment transactions on the Digital Turkish Lira Network were “executed successfully.”
The CBRT will “continue to run the limited, closed-circuit pilot tests with technology stakeholders in the first quarter of 2023.” Findings obtained from these tests “will be shared with the public via a comprehensive evaluation report.”
In 2023, the CBRT will expand the Digital Turkish Lira Collaboration Platform “to involve selected banks and financial technology companies, and will unveil advanced phases of the pilot study that will further widen the participation.”
Against this backdrop, the CBRT will “continue to run tests for authentic architectural setups designed in areas such as the use of distributed ledger technologies in payment systems and the integration of these technologies with instant payment systems.”
Studies on the legal aspects of the Digital Turkish Lira “demonstrate that digital identification is of critical importance for the project.”
Therefore, studies on the economic and legal framework of the Digital Turkish Lira as well as its technological requirements “will be prioritized throughout 2023.”
Central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects are increasingly being launched across the globe for the past 5 years. China appears to have taken the lead when it comes to developing and introducing a CBDC to local consumers. However, CBDCs and other virtual currency initiatives are still in their early stages of development and adoption.
Reserve banks throughout the world have expressed a wide range of opinions on the feasibility of issuing a CBDC.
As covered recently, a joint research effort between the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into the technical feasibility of a potential central bank digital currency “is now complete.”
The Boston Fed’s work on CBDC with MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative is known as Project Hamilton. Boston Fed Executive Vice President Jim Cunha said “the now-concluded project was ‘agnostic’ from the start about any future policy decisions regarding new technologies and U.S. currency.”
Instead, Cunha said, the project “focused on better understanding the capabilities and limitations of different technologies that might be used to manage and transfer CBDCs.”
