A digital pound developed by the Bank of England could end up running on software that is not a blockchain, the distributed database technology underpinning cryptocurrencies and other digital coins issued by central banks.
All options are on the table as the UK plugs ahead with research to figure out if a digital pound — which has been dubbed “Britcoin” — is worth building, according to Tom Mutton, who heads the Bank of England’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) project. At a recent meeting of technologists hosted by the Bank to discuss how a digital pound might be designed, “none of them agreed with each other at any point,” Mutton said in a podcast interview with Bloomberg News.
