Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies: RSCoin

In 2015, when the idea of a CBDC was in its early days and J.P. Koning's Fedcoin was talked about in various blogs, two scholars from University College London came up with the little-known RSCoin as described in “Centrally Banked Cryptocurrencies.”

This was a unique approach to what they called centrally banked cryptocurrencies: "RSCoin, a cryptocurrency framework in which central banks maintain complete control over the monetary supply, but rely on a distributed set of authorities, or mintettes, to prevent double-spending."

George Danezis and Sarah Meiklejohn saw a permissioned blockchain, running a retail CBDC. The mintettes were nodes that would process transactions under the authority of the central bank.

They also worked out a protocol for currency exchanges between CBDCs running on different blockchains, using "atomic cross-chain trading." The system would allow central banks to monitor currency exchanges.