Bachelor/Master Thesis
Exploring Central Bank Digital Currencies implementations
By 2023, nearly one hundred countries have been discussing how to design and introduce national
central bank-issued digital currency (CBDC). As they eagerly explore the potential benefits of a CBDC (e.g., financial inclusion, increased efficiency, cross-border payments enhancement, etc.), it is imperative to turn our attention to one of the most important aspects of this evolution – privacy.
In this thesis, we’d like to explore different CBDC implementations and discuss how they each implement privacy features and how they compare. Additionally, we’d like to see how they could fit into architectures proposed by central banks.
References
[1]S. Allen, S. Capkun, I. Eyal, G. Fanti, B. A. Ford, J. Grimmelmann, A. Juels, K. Kostiainen, S. Meiklejohn, A. Miller, E. Prasad, K. Wüst, and F. Zhang, “Design choices for central bank digital currency: Policy and technical considerations,” Working Paper 27634, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2020.
[2]E. Androulaki, J. Camenisch, A. D. Caro, M. Dubovitskaya, K. Elkhiyaoui, and B. Tackmann, “Privacy-preserving auditable token payments in a permissioned blockchain system,” in AFT, pp. 255–267, ACM, 2020.
[3]D. Chaum and T. Moser, “eCash 2.0.” Unpublished, 2022.
[4]A. Tomescu, A. Bhat, B. Applebaum, I. Abraham, G. Gueta, B. Pinkas, and A. Yanai, “UTT: decentralized ecash with accountable privacy,” IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch., p. 452, 2022.
[5]K. Wüst, K. Kostiainen, V. Capkun, and S. Capkun, “PRCash: Fast, private and regulated transactions for digital currencies,” in Financial Cryptography, vol. 11598 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 158–178, Springer, 2019.
[6]K. Wüst, K. Kostiainen, N. Delius, and S. Capkun, “Platypus: A central bank digital currency with unlinkable transactions and privacy-preserving regulation,” in CCS, pp. 2947–2960, ACM, 2022.
Nature of the project: Theory 100%.