Privacy should reportedly be a key aspect when working on the development for digital currency, as claimed by Robert Bench, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s director of applied research. 

Specifically, in Bench’s idea, privacy is reportedly a feature that has been perceived as highly important from a technical point of view, and should be highlighted in the designing process, not an afterthought. 

“One of our learnings is that the questions of privacy and identity must be considered at the earliest stage of architecture. Making privacy or identity an ad hoc process is suboptimal from both a privacy or identity perspective, and most importantly from a security perspective.” Bench reportedly shared his remarks at a Chamber of Digital Commerce panel.

Bench’s remarks reportedly served as a response to a question generated by panel moderator and former U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman Chris Giancarlo, inquiring about privacy considerations, regarding a US CBDC, along with different types of digital money. 

During the debate, Tether (USDT) co-founder Craig Sellars reportedly mentioned physical cash as the benchmark, for the level of privacy the world requires, as they offer perks that cannot be replaced – Fungibility, privacy and anonymity at the peer-to-peer scale. 

“We should shift our questioning to this: If we have the technology to preserve those exact features of paper dollars, why should we accept digital dollars with any fewer freedoms? I argue that we shouldn’t and we mustn’t.”