Ecuadorian Presidential Candidate Floats National Cryptocurrency Idea
Ecuadorian presidential candidate wants the country to join in the CBDC bandwagon.
Making Ecuador Crypto-Friendly
According to a recent report by Decrypt, Ecuadorian presidential candidate for 2021 and the current president of the Ecuadorian-Chilean Chamber of Mining, Geovanni Andrade, recently stated that he has plans to develop a national cryptocurrency to enable transactions within Ecuador.
The presidential hopeful, in a recent interview with the digital newspaper Primicias shed light on his government plan, stating that a national cryptocurrency would make internal transactions easier and facilitate their audit.
In addition, Andrade said the national cryptocurrency project is an essential part of his vision for Ecuador.
Andrade noted:
“We are looking at ways to create an Ecuadorian cryptocurrency, this does not mean that we are going to escape from dollarization—we must support dollarization.”
Adding:
“It is very important that we create the cryptocurrency for all the internal benefits within the country, such as internal transactions. This would work very well for Ecuador.”
Although Andrade sounds optimistic about the ambitious national cryptocurrency plan, it is worth giving a thought whether the vision is a realistic one or not.
For instance, Andrade is not particularly in an envious position within the Ecuadorian political scene. The candidate has already lost the support of his own party.
That being said, it is also the first time that a politician from Ecuador sounds open to the idea of financial decentralization and promotes the use of blockchain technology to achieve the same.
The Race to Launch CBDC
The global race to launch central bank digital currencies (CBDC) seems to be picking steam with an increasing number of countries joining in.
China is perhaps the inarguable leader in terms of having the necessary infrastructure, and testing in place to exhaustively trial its secretive yet controversial digital yuan.
Other nations, including Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK are mulling own plans to launch respective CBDCs sometime in the future.
As recently reported by BTCManager on January 4, the Ukrainian government had partnered with the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) to develop a CBDC on the Stellar Blockchain Network.
