Brazil plans to launch its central bank digital currency (CBDC) in 2024, following a closed pilot in 2023 with financial institutions, said the president of the Central Bank of Brazil, Roberto Campos Neto. He added that Brazil’s model had gained international recognition.
Neto made the announcement at an event hosted by news outlet Poder 360. He claimed that the CBDC’s design would encourage financial institutions to tokenize their assets with the added benefit of efficiency.
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“If the digital currency is actually a tokenized deposit, it inherits all the regulation that already applies to deposits,” Neto said, adding that the CBDC should not harm balance sheets or disrupt monetary policy.
According to Neto tokenization of deposits should improve settlements, funding costs, and auditing of banks. He also predicted that tokenization would increase the adoption of the central bank’s payment system Pix, as it would make transactions cheaper through the elimination of the merchant discount rate (MDR) fee. Merchants have to pay the MDR to card machine suppliers.
Neto also claimed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had approached the central bank and said that its digital currency model was easy to implement and that other central banks should consider it.
“In the end, we were even flattered to have thought of a system that other central banks are now thinking of,” he said.
