According to the directives sent by President Joe Biden, the Office of Science and Technology Police went on to submit a report that analyzed the 18 CBDC Designs that could possibly be implemented in the country. The technical analysis for the 18 designs was made over six broad shelves- governance, participants, transactions, security, adjustments, and data.
The OSTP definitely predicts practical limitations and technical complexities when trying to recreate a permissionless system that will be governed by a central bank. The Office added that it was definitely possible that the technology that underpinned a permissionless approach will be improving significantly over time- which would definitely make it more suitable for use over a longer CBDC system.
CBDC Designs Have Been Selected By the OSTP
Assisting legislators in choosing the ideal US CBDC design, the report from OSTP did highlight the implications of bringing in third parties in the two design choices under the category of participants- interoperability and transport layer. For governance, the report also weighed several factors that were related to access tiering, permissioning, remediation, and identity privacy.
Several factors that the office did want the policymakers to discuss would be secure hardware and cryptography, transaction privacy, signatures, transaction programmability, offline transactions, ledger history, and data model, holding limits, and fungibility. The technical evaluation for the US CBDC system also highlights the inclination of the program to move towards a hardware-protected, off-ledger system.
While analyzing the CBDC designs, the OSTP report also spoke about how crypto assets used around 50 billion kilowatt-hours of energy annually in the country- which was about 38% of the global total.
