Industry Players Join Former CFTC Royalty on Digital Dollar Project’s New Board

The Digital Dollar Project, which advocates a blockchain-backed digital dollar in the United States, has announced the inaugural roster of its Advisory Board.

The new advisors joining the founders of the project

The project is an initiative of several former heads of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Accenture. The new advisory board includes 22 members with broad backgrounds in finance and payment technologies. They include former CFTC Commissioner Sharon Bowen, PayPal policy exec Usman Ahmed and Georgetown fintech law professor and occasional Cointelegraph contributor Chris Brummer.

The announcement for the new board says the advisors aim to “help guide the framework for practical steps that could be taken to establish a U.S. Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).”

The project’s directors include former CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo and former Director of the Commission’s fintech office, LabCFTC, Daniel Gorfine. Speaking with Cointelegraph, Giancarlo explained the goal of the board:

“We’ve brought together a broad cross-section of individuals — not institutions, but individuals —  with experience in monetary policy, central banking, commercial banking, KYC/anti-money laundering, privacy law, constitutional law, economics, accounting, tax — all other disciplines that need to be brought together to examine this and its implications not just for the US economy, but implications for the global economy, where the dollar remains the world’s primary reserve currency.”

Question of digital dollar amid U.S. aid?

The news comes amid some major back-and-forth for the crypto community, as various versions of the stimulus bill to fight the economic damage wrought by COVID-19 in the U.S. included provisions promoting a digital dollar and affiliate wallets.

“We did not have anything to do with what was in that House bill,” Giancarlo told Cointelegraph, but said that legislators may have been inspired by the Project’s language: “We’ve been using the phrase ‘digital dollar’ quite consistently to refer to a US central bank digital currency.”

Giancarlo and Gorfine first announced the Digital Dollar Project in January of this year. The initiative built on an October Op-Ed from Giancarlo in which he advocated the need for a blockchain-backed digital dollar.