Central Bank of Brazil Hints at Credit-Focused CBDC Pilot Phase

The third phase of the CBDC pilot will involve implementing tokenization solutions that allow customers to provide banks with visibility into their collateral assets in Brazil. This, in turn, would simplify the process of assigning credit within an onchain, open, and shared finance ecosystem.

Central Bank of Brazil Seeks to Solve Onchain Credit in Drex’s CBDC Third Pilot Phase

The Central Bank of Brazil has revealed the new direction that its current central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot, drex, will take in the short term. Rogerio Antonio Lucca, executive secretary of the central bank, highlighted that the third and next phase of the project will focus on tokenization and developing a system to support credit functionality.

At Febraban Tech, one of the largest financial tech events in Brazil, Lucca stated:

The customer must have ease of use and a sense of security to ensure that the national financial system develops services and resolves problems such as high debt in poor quality credit.

One of the ideas floated by the executive is to devise a platform enabling customers to give banks and other financial institutions visibility on their assets, incentivizing financial inclusion and solving the poor credit availability problem.

A slide from a presentation detailing the processes to create a credit marketplace. Source: Central Bank of Brazil.

The executive pointed out that this new third phase would commence in the second half of this year, highlighting that it would address this problem, enabling banks to democratize credit access and reduce the fees they charge for their financial services.

“We will close the second phase and go deeper, but the direction has been set,” Lucca concluded.

The drex pilot, currently in its second phase, has encountered issues that impact its viability. Its main roadblock has been the lack of a privacy solution that fulfills all the requirements the bank needs to apply bank secrecy-like laws to drex transactions, meaning that transactions must be obfuscated from third parties but visible for regulators.

Since February, when an official report detailed that none of the proposed solutions solved this problem, there have been no public statements on the issue. No date for the general launch of drex has been announced yet.

Read more: Central Bank of Brazil: CBDC Privacy Problem Still Unresolved