About 100 countries around the world are exploring the possibility of creating official digital currencies, different from cryptocurrencies as they are protected by their respective central banks and have an official status, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported on Wednesday.
The main difference between central bank digital currencies (known as CBDC, for its acronym in English) and the popular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or ethereum is that the former have a single issuer (the central bank of each country) that controls the money market, just as with paper currencies.
However, the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies in recent years has led many countries to consider or even start working on CBDC, according to the IMF, which He cited as examples the cases of the Bahamas, Uruguay, Sweden, China, Canada and various Caribbean countries.
“If designed prudently, CBDCs can offer greater resilience, security, higher availability, and lower costs than private forms of digital currencies,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said at the virtual launch of an IMF report on this type of currency.
Georgieva explained that the interest in digital currencies issued by central banks is growing and that if successful projects turn out, they will continue to increase confidence in these centralized financial institutions.
Unlike the money that the user currently perceives as virtual (deposits in commercial banks, for example), CBDCs would be issued directly by the central bank just like paper currencies, so that a citizen could have a digital portfolio with CBDC without being linked to any commercial financial entity.
In addition, CBDCs would allow, in the style of cryptocurrencies, immediate transactions of all kinds, without, for example, a transfer of money between individuals takes several hours or days to materialize. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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