During the fourth year of my MEng degree, I worked as research assistant for the FIRE project, a UCL-affiliated programme tasked with implementing the CBDC (central bank digital currency) architecture introduced in Goodell et. al. The authors propose a novel solution to the pervasive tension between regulatory oversight and consumer privacy.
Fundamentally, I am interested in how technology impacts our values, rights and identity. I believe we are at a critical juncture where designing digital infrastructure must prioritise human freedom, dignity, and privacy.
In particular, the way we architect digital money will have profound implications for the economic agency of individuals and the very fabric of free societies. Physical cash, for all its limitations, provides a certain degree of privacy, anonymity and control to the bearer. In contrast, most digital payment solutions today, rely on accounts linked to our real identities. Every transaction is recorded, analysed and could potentially be blocked or censored.
A good central bank digital currency (CBDC) would empower individuals to make payments using digital objects in their possession rather than accounts that are linked to their identities, affording them verifiable privacy and control over their digital payments.
Unlike other CBDC proposals and most cryptocurrency solutions that masquerade as decentralised solutions, my supervisor and his collaborators envisioned a provable, private by design architecture based on:
As a master’s student among established professionals from BoE, TODAq and Stellar Foundation, I found it initially intimidating to adopt a technical leadership stance. However, I quickly became a well-respected member of the team and a go-to for most things technical.
My overall responsibilities were:
Throughout this one-year collaboration we developed a complex system design, implemented a faithful prototype, had many intriguing technical and socio-technical discussions and learned to balance engineering rigour with real-world practicality.
The project culminated with a successful representation of our technical developments at the FIRE workshop in London in August 2022, which was attended by cybersecurity experts, regulators, and representatives from commercial banks, industry associations, and consultancy firms.