According to LedgerInsights, the Bank of Korea completed the second phase of its retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) simulations in late June and today shared the results. While it was happy with some aspects of its digital won simulations, such as using CBDC for offline payments and cross border remittances, the central bank highlighted performance issues with the blockchain technology.

Specifically, it found the overall performance of the Ethereum-based blockchain insufficient, including the scaling solutions and privacy technology that was tested.

“There will be some limitations in real-time processing of transactions during peak times”, said the Bank of Korea.

One of its tests simulated peak demand by sustaining 4,200 transactions per second (TPS) for 30 minutes. At that activity level, users sometimes had to wait up to a minute for a response (latency).