South korea's central depository financial institution, the Bank of Korea (BOK), plans to organize a chore forcefulness defended to central depository financial institution digital currency (CBDC) inquiry in the new year's day.

In its "Monetary Policy for 2022" brief, published on Dec. 27, BOK said it would continue to build on its existing research into distributed ledger applied science, crypto assets, and CBDCs and to play an agile role in overseeing and enhancing the security of payment and settlement systems.

Recruiting digital currency experts

As role of its CBDC research agenda, BOK ostensibly plans to recruit additional experts in the field. On Dec. 10, the institution had posted a job listing for digital currency experts, according to a report from the Korea Times.

In parallel to organizing its task force, BOK says it will actively engage in discussions with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and other relevant international entities to go on abreast of CBDC development at other central banks.

The bank says information technology plans to use BIS' Principles for Financial Market place Infrastructures (PFMI) to enact assessment principles for improving its oversight of domestic financial systems.

The PFMI is a framework established by the BIS for managing market risks such as credit, liquidity, custody, settlement, operational and investment risks across payments systems, securities settlement systems, merchandise repositories and other infrastructures.

BOK has previously stopped short of pursuing retail CBDC issuance

Every bit previously reported, a CBDC is a digital currency issued by a cardinal bank, which has the condition of legal tender and other properties of centralized, fiat money.

Having examined the possible legal and social effectiveness of a CBDC project, BOK concluded in January 2022 that in that location was no reason for the bank to issue a CBDC that would exist bachelor for the wider public in the well-nigh time to come.

CBDC inquiry past key banks globally has broadly separated the written report of the benefits of a "retail" or "general purpose" CBDC attainable to the general public from "wholesale" variants of CBDCs, which would be express for use past financial institutions.

The BIS has in the by warned that "a general purpose [retail] CBDC could give rising to higher instability of commercial bank deposit funding" and potentially fuel faster bank runs.

France plans to pilot a wholesale CBDC in 2022, the bank'due south governor, François Villeroy de Galhau, revealed before this month.