The Reserve Bank of Australia today posted a job advertisement for a Central Bank Digital Currency team.
This exciting development comes hot on the heels of the RBA's submission to the Bragg Inquiry, citing 4 year old research, that "the case for issuing a CBDC for use by households has not been established".
However the RBA has been more upbeat on a CBDC for wholesale market participants to take advantage of:
Speed, cost and robustness of payments;
Atomic transactions; and
Programmable money.
The RBA has also conducted several projects to test out distributed ledger technology for wholesale market participants, involving major players such as the Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank and Perpetual in those tests.
The new job advertisement states:-
We are researching whether there is a case for a CBDC in Australia, and if so, how it might be designed and what benefits and other implications it would have. This work is contributing to one of the RBA’s strategic focus areas on supporting the evolution of payments in Australia.
A cross-disciplinary team will be established to conduct this research, with a view to:
Designing research projects aimed at improving the RBA's understanding of the case for and implications of a CBDC; and
Considering different technical solutions for an Australian CBDC
Given the supplementary submission made by the RBA to the Bragg Inquiry this would seem to include both retail and wholesale CBDC opportunities. This exciting employment opportunity is now taking applications, and since there are a wealth of projects around the world already ahead of Australia in the CBDC race, there will be plenty of material and real world data to research as Australia moves closer to a wholesale or retail CBDC.