The regulator discovered some critical issues to be resolved before the national rollout
The Central Bank of Sweden has completed the first stage of its digital currency testing. Before the e-krona becomes widely available to country residents, the regulator must sort out several critical problems. Coin scalability and performance have been one of the concerns for authorities.
“The solution tested in phase one of the e-krona pilot has met the performance requirements made in the public procurement. But this has taken place in a limited test environment and the new technology’s capacity to manage retail payments on a large scale needs to be investigated and tested further,” states the report.
The Central Bank has also noted the security issue, where the data stored in transactions is subject to the banking secrecy act, hence this data must be kept confidential.
Mithra Sundberg, the head of the Riksbank unit that’s running the project from Stockholm, in a Bloomber interview suggested that a new legal framework is probably required before digital currency can be used. Given the scope of task facing the regulator, she believes the testing could stretch all the way into 2026.
Earlier, the Bank of Japan also commenced the testing experiments of issuing digital currency that will last until March of 2022. The bank plans to examine the main functionality of the digital money in its payment instrument capacity, whereas the testing itself will include three phases.