JUNE 25, 2024 • By Matthew Tierney
ECE professor Andreas Veneris recently received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, the premier event in the field.
The paper proposes that we can achieve complete anonymity with digital cash, much like privacy with physical paper currency.
The paper comes at a time when the prevailing belief is that Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) could be used for public surveillance. In the U.S., Congress passed a bill to ban CBDCs under the Anti-Surveillance Act. However, Veneris’s research demonstrates ways to safeguard privacy while using digital cash, emphasizing that CBDCs needn’t compromise anonymity.
The study was a collaborative effort involving the Bank of Canada and the Central Intelligence Agency, both of which provided early commentary.
In February 2024, Veneris also earned another Distinguished Paper Award at the flagship software engineering ACM conference, ACM SIGSOFT, for his work with colleagues from the Bank of Canada in the area of risk management for digital finance.
Congratulations, Professor Veneris!
