Colombia’s central bank, Banco de la República, is working with Peersyst and Ripple to test a pilot blockchain on the XRP ledger. The pilot program will run throughout 2023. Its goal is to show the general public how useful blockchain can be.
Colombia’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies (MinTIC) will oversee the project, which will make use of Ripple’s recently released central bank digital currency (CBDC) platform.
Ripple and @Peersyst are partnering with Colombia’s @BancoRepublica in conjunction with @Ministerio_TIC to pilot use cases that will enhance Colombia’s high-value payment system.🇨🇴
Learn more about the partnership: https://t.co/X9jyJ3pvDa
— Ripple (@Ripple) June 15, 2023
Testing The Pilot Blockchain
An announcement from June 15 says that the pilot blockchain will run throughout 2023 and that its goal is to show users the utility of the technology.
“The goal of the third phase of MinTIC’s experimentation of blockchain will be to educate national and territorial public entities through interactive and collaborative real-world application experiments of how blockchain technology’s unparalleled speed, scalability, and transparency can revolutionize payment systems and data management.”
The XRP ledger CBDC platform is also used as the base for similar pilot projects. Some of these projects took place in Hong Kong, Bhutan, Palau, and Montenegro.
CBDC team making significant progress with the launch of the new #cbdc platform 👌 Four countries now announced 👍👍 Grateful to the team at @Ripple who are developing the best platform for the future of Digital Currencies 👌 Palau 🇵🇼 Bhutan 🇧🇹 Montenegro 🇲🇪 Hong Kong 🇭🇰…
— Antony Welfare (@AntonyWelfare) May 19, 2023
Ripple is still growing, even though the company is being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) since 2020. The SEC says that Ripple sold unregistered securities worth $1.3 billion in the form of its XRP token. Ripple says that XRP is not a security. And that the SEC has never told it so with a warning or notice.
In addition, the company says it spent $200 million to fight the lawsuit and defend itself. No one knows for sure when the trial will end. However, many people think that the release of the so-called “Hinman documents” could affect the rest of the legal proceedings.
The Hinman documents refer to internal SEC communications about a speech that former director of the SEC’s corporate finance division, William Hinman, gave in 2018. During his speech, Hinman said that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) might start out as securities. But, would later become commodities if they became decentralized enough.
At the time, internal SEC notes showed that the commission was worried that Hinman’s comments could make it “difficult for the agency to take a different position on Ether in the future.”
Even though Himan’s speech was made before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ripple. And moreover didn’t directly mention XRP, experts say it shows that even the SEC knew there was confusion about how it treated cryptocurrencies.
