As part of the Bank of England’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) design phase, it explored an offline CBDC for its digital pound. At this stage it was only interested in technology issues, so it tested solutions provided by Thales, Secretarium, IDEMIA Secure Transactions, Quali-Sign and Consult Hyperion. It concluded the solutions were technically capable of delivering final payments, but found challenges relating to usability and the prevention and detection of counterfeits and double spending.
The first challenge was that the offline and online CBDC balances are kept separate in the wallet, which users might find odd given they don’t care about the technical ramifications. Sometimes wifi outages can catch a user off guard. But if they haven’t already moved money into the offline balance, they won’t be able to use the offline functionality unless someone else pays them offline.
Offline payments tend to use secure elements either on a smartphone, a special SIM or smart cards. Given they have limited storage capacity, this caps the number of transactions that are possible before reconnecting to the network. One of the solutions tested was particularly limited on this front.
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