It is reported that Ethereum (ETH) is being used for the trial of a digital Shekel by the Bank of Israel. This was confirmed by a spokesman of the bank.
It is reported that the IT department of the bank has set up digital wallets for members and users who are involved in the trial and have been transferring equivalents of the digital shekels across wallets to try out and see how it works and to study the reliability as well.
These tokens that are said to be equivalent to digital shekels are not on the mainnet as yet and so far, no real money is being involved in the trial. It is believed that all this testing is carried out on the testnet within the network of the Bank of Israel.
The race is well and truly on between the central banks to introduce digital currencies and the race is among the various blockchains as well, as Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP) and others compete for this lucrative business. They realize the importance of being adopted for such central bank digital currencies and each of them has competing technologies to enable the CBDCs which puts them in direct competition with each other to convince the banks to use their technology.
The blockchains that are finally selected as and when the banks introduce the digital currencies would get a huge boost and would be remembered well into the future as well. This is why we are seeing stiff competition between blockchains like Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) in this space.
The current technology that is being tried out by the Bank of Israel is also reportedly being tried out by the central banks of Hong Kong, Thailand, and Australia as well. It is also believed that China is also well on its way to launch its own digital currency and the decks are being cleared for the same, with the authorities there cracking down on mining and other similar activity over the last couple of months.
Ripple (XRP) continues its struggle with the SEC in the US and the regulators there do not seem to be in any hurry to introduce digital currencies shortly. Recently, we had reported that the Swiss and the French central banks were carrying out trials for CBDCs though the technology involved has not been confirmed whether it is Ethereum (ETH) or Ripple (XRP). These are indeed exciting times for the crypto markets as we are seeing growth and innovation in several sectors within the crypto domain and it is indeed only a matter of time before a central bank introduces a digital currency which will then become a reference point for other banks to use ETH or XRP or others for theirs.