A UK tech start-up has stepped in where Germany, Switzerland and the US Federal Reserve fears to tread.
These countries have so far all rejected the idea of creating a “national cryptocurrency”, with only the US considering creating its own digital fiat currency to improve “financial governance”.
London start-up, Decentr, is stepping in to fix the problem that it says is preventing the very necessary widespread adoption of digital fiat currencies or “CBDCs” (Central Bank Digital Currencies).
Decentr spokesman, Rich James, says: “The problem is that no suitable platform exists to issue CBDCs on a national level; nothing sustainable anyway. When compared with the advantages of issuing the same currency on our native platform, Decentr, the theoretical shortcomings of CBDCs are revealed in practice.”
Over 40 countries have looked into or are looking into creating a national digital fiat currency. This is almost always on the pretext that the digital currency is to be adopted by a federal regulator, essentially under its rules, with the central bank issuing digital fiat money, rather than crytpocurrencies in their most popular, decentralised form.
The Decentr team dismiss this as patently ludicrous logic. According to Decentr, if states do not offer a decentralised CBDC with superior properties to fiat (which is presumably why they are looking into them in the first place), the public will simply choose an alternative, unconnected to state issuance, which does.
There are grounds for this stance. Even the US lawmakers who tabled the letter to the Federal Reserve, Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) and Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.) outline concerns they have about risks to the US dollar if another country or private company creates a widely used cryptocurrency.
James says: “Our native token, Dec, underwritten by a radically-new heterodox school of economics, called ‘deconomics’, is set to be this widely used cryptocurrency. Convenience and value, coupled with security and immutability, will ensure its uptake is swifter than lawmen, working within the snail-paced constraints of state bureaucracies, can predict or respond to. They need to take action now.”
The Decentr platform allows states to create a fully decentralised currency, issued on Decentr, as part of an alternative (alt) economy controlled at the level of the individual citizen.
Decentr achieves this by replacing decentralised-data-as-currency with money-as currency – 100% secure data having the same “value store” properties as money.
This radically-new economic paradigm is set to usher in CBDCs as part of a true data economy for every individual.
