Brazil's CBDC pilot contains code that can freeze or reduce funds, developers say

Pedro Magalhães, a blockchain developer who claims to have reverse engineered the Brazilian pilot CBDC, found code that would allow accounts to be frozen or purged at will.

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A blockchain developer who claims to have reverse-engineered the source code of the Brazilian central bank's pilot digital currency has discovered functions in the code that would allow a central authority to freeze funds or reduce balances.

He has since argued, however, that there might be situations where such functions could be beneficial.

The source code for the Real Digital pilot project was released on the GitHub portal on July 6 by Brazil's largest bank. It was explained at the time that the RealDigital Pilot was intended for use in a test environment only and that the "presented architecture" was subject to further modifications.

Pedro Magalhães – blockchain developer and founder of technology consulting firm Iora Labs – claimed later in the day that he was able to "reverse engineer" Banco Central do Brazil's Digital Real open source code, revealing functions in the code.< /p>

Functions included the ability to freeze and unfreeze accounts, increase and decrease balances, move Real Digital from one address to another, and create or burn Real Digital from a certain address.

6/ These resources can be executed by any entity that receives the appropriate permissions from the controlling entity of the new system, i.e. the Central Bank.< /p>

Among the modifications that the authorities could potentially make using these functions are, for example: pic.twitter.com/AT5v1rOQbK

— Vini Barbosa (@vinibarbosabr)