State-Issued Digital Currencies: The Countries Which Adopted, Rejected or Researched the Concept

The concept of CBDCs, or national digital currencies - the scenario in which the trend of digital currencies gets adopted by a federal regulator, essentially under its rules, with the central bank issuing digital fiat money, rather than cryptocurrencies in their most popular, decentralized form and becomes not only a regulator, but clients' account holder as well - has attracted many governments across the world.

Following the concept of CBDCs, eCFA is fully dependent on the central banking system and can only be issued by an authorized financial institution, although it has been developed separately: eCFA was created as a result of the collaboration between local bank Banque Régionale de Marchés and eCurrency Mint Limited, an Ireland-based startup that assists central banks in creating their own digital fiat currencies.

Hong Kong has a much clearer position regarding CBDCs compared to mainland China: On May 30, its government issued a press release stating that Hong Kong will not issue a central bank digital currency in the near future, citing the existence of an already efficient payment infrastructure.

"The issuance of central bank digital currencies for general use could be analogous to allowing households and firms to directly have accounts in the central bank. This may have a large impact on the aforementioned two-tiered currency system and private banks' financial intermediation."

Notably, Azari-Jahromi did not clarify whether the locally-developed digital currency will eventually be made available to the public, nor whether it will be issued by Post Bank - 51 percent of which is owned by the government - or by another state body.

"Singapore has reportedly advanced in experimenting with a central bank digital currency, although it's not likely to go public. In June 2017, the Monetary Authority of Singapore released a report regarding the so-called 'Project Ubin,' a blockchain-powered plan to put"tokenized form of the Singapore Dollar on a." The project is a collaboration between the central bank and blockchain consortium R3, focused on the development of a blockchain pilot to facilitate cross-border payments.

In November 2017, the Bank of Canada published a report titled "Central Bank Digital Currency: Motivations and Implications," which was co-authored by its Currency Department employee.

The Bank of Canada report mentioned the lack of transaction fees and financial inclusion as other potential benefits of CBDC but highlighted anonymity as "undesirable for central bank digital currency.

The People's Bank of China has been researching the concept of CBDC for quite some time - a specific research institute named Digital Currency Research Lab was established for this very purpose.

On June 5, the Bank of Thailand joined the ranks of countries considering issuing their own cryptocurrencies, as BoT governor Veerathai Santiprabhob revealed details of a new project in which the central bank teamed up with other Thai banks to develop a "new way of conducting interbank settlement" using a CBDC. According to the BoT, releasing its own cryptocurrency would reduce the transaction costs and validation time "due to less intermediation process needed compared to the current systems.