The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has partnered with Mercado Bitcoin, Latin America's largest exchange, to develop one of the nine projects selected for the LIFT Challenge Real Digital, a collaborative environment run by the Central Bank of Brazil to explore use cases for a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
The Central Bank of Brazil said in March that it has picked nine partners to assist in the development of a digital Real, the country's central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The crypto exchange Mercado Bitcoin, Santander Brasil and Ita Unibanco were among the partners picked at the time. This follows the Central Bank announcing late last year that a CBDC pilot program would begin in 2022 and a full version would be introduced in 2024.
In other news, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC US) to provide a framework for evaluating blockchain protocol electricity consumption and emissions. SDF and PwC US analyze electricity use, greenhouse gas emissions, e-waste/embodied carbon, disparities in consensus procedures and areas for future research within the framework.
Stellar price action
In recent days, the Stellar (XLM) price has been trapped in a limited range as concerns about the cryptocurrency industry persist. The price of the XLM token is currently $0.130. As a result, its total market capitalization is nearly $3.25 billion, ranking the 27th largest cryptocurrency at the time of publication.
A closer examination into its performance reveals that it is comparable to the performance of leading cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin, for example, has remained at $30,000, while Ethereum has remained at $2,000.