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Bank of England Targets 30-Strong Team for Digital Currency: Report

Among the positions available are digital pound security architect and digital pound solutions architect.

The Bank of England is reportedly hiring 30 people to develop a national digital currency. (Camomile Shumba/CoinDesk)
The Bank of England is reportedly hiring 30 people to develop a national digital currency. (Camomile Shumba/CoinDesk)

The Bank of England is looking to hire a staff of as many as 30 people to develop a central bank digital currency, the Sunday Times reported, without saying where it got the figure.

In February, the U.K.'s central bank and finance ministry said they were starting further research and development on a digital version of the pound sterling, and invited the public to weigh in on the plans. While the project has been dubbed "Britcoin" in the press, the bank is less keen on the moniker, saying no decision has been made on whether a digital pound would use distributed ledger technology.

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The bank's website careers page lists positions for a digital pound security architect and digital pound solutions architect, both added toward the end of last month. Both pay as much as 80,000 British pounds ($99,000) in salary. The Treasury advertised for a head of central bank digital currency in January.

"A team of 30 seems like quite a significant resource to focus on the digital pound," said Ian Taylor, a board adviser for trade association CryptoUK, according to the newspaper. "It shows the impact it would have, and that the bank are serious about it."


Sheldon Reback

Sheldon Reback is CoinDesk editorial's Regional Head of Europe. Before joining the company, he spent 26 years as an editor at Bloomberg News, where he worked on beats as diverse as stock markets and the retail industry as well as covering the dot-com bubble of 2000-2002. He managed the Bloomberg Terminal's main news page and also worked on a global project to produce short, chart-based stories across the newsroom. He previously worked as a journalist for a number of technology magazines in Hong Kong. Sheldon has a degree in industrial chemistry and an MBA. He owns ether and bitcoin below CoinDesk's notifiable limit.

Sheldon Reback