by Rushali 
Stephen Harper, the former Canadian Prime Minister has said bitcoin could become a global reserve currency. And Goldman Sachs is considering entering into the crypto custody business. Reportedly, the major investment bank has issued a request for information to explore digital asset custody, though it may not interested in becoming a prime broker.
Crypto-native Anchorage attained conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to become a national digital bank last week.
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Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) is a permission blockchain network for building decentralized applications and tokens will test a CBDC by the second half of 2021. The network’s plan is to become a blockchain of blockchains with a total of 30 public blockchain integrations slated for this year.
LINK, the native token of the Chainlink oracle system, has hit a fresh all-time high as bitcoin trades sideways. LINK’s new high at $23.68 set in overnight trading. Its previous high was reached in August at $19.90. Link is one of many altcoins that are benefiting from consolidation in bitcoin markets and a rotation of capital into more speculative bets.
MetLife is the financial institution to take a look at cryptocurrencies. In a primer titled “The Blockchain Blockbuster,” MetLife Investment Management (MIM), the life insurance giant’s investment wing, has examined the nature of money from “Yapese stones to central bank digital currencies.”
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The report is 18 pages long and was published on Jan 8. It says that interest in CBDC development was increased by the explosion of digital assets unleashed after Bitcoin came on the scene. And it ends with saying “western countries” could potentially look towards China’s digital yuan experiment as a guide.
The paper’s authors Alexander Villacampa and Jun Jiang think that CBCD’s and cryptocurrencies can exist side by side. They said, “Bitcoin and its ilk are constantly battling to maintain a balance between three key concerns known as the ‘Blockchain Trilemma.’
The trilemma, often visualized as a triangle, consists of three issues related to sustainable public blockchain development: scalability, decentralization, and security. It is assumed in the trilemma that by strengthening any one of the triangle’s vertices, at least one of the others must weaken.” The scalability dilemma was criticism for blockchain networks. But it was solved in 2018, but many people are still thinking about it.
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The trilemma is just an issue of decentralization and centralization, with pros and cons of moving between the two. If one chooses decentralization naturally makes the network slower, though more secure. Centralization reduces security, by introducing a single entity that can be attacked, but improves transaction throughput.
Nowadays, Bitcoin makers are looking for 2 layer solutions, like Lightning, to create a usable payments system out of a secure base, while Ethereum developers are exploring layer 2s and a network overhaul.
This problem between managing scalability and security is faced in the whole payment universe. For CBDCs, as Villacampa and Jiang note, the “expansion of electronic payment systems via blockchain technology that has captured the interest of central banks who believe they are uniquely capable of providing not only a better alternative but also able to lay the foundation for an officially-sanctioned global electronic payments regime.”
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