The Monetary Fund seeks to favor the transactionality of digital currencies backed by central banks. The goal is to prevent cryptocurrencies from taking center stage in the economy.
He International Monetary Fund (IMF) is working on a platform for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to enable cross-country transactions. This was reported this Monday by the Managing Director of the credit agency, Kristalina Georgieva at a conference attended by representatives of African central banks in Rabat, Morocco.
He explained that this intention is based on the conviction that “the CBDC they should not be fragmented national proposals”, for which reason he considered that, in order to have more efficient and fair transactions“we need systems that connect countries: interoperability”, according to the Reuters agency.
And he assured that, for this reason, in the IMFthey are working on the concept of a global CBDC platform. Thus, the Fund official pointed out that the organization’s intention is for central banks to agree on a common regulatory framework for digital currencies that allows global interoperability.
CBDC: what they are and what the IMF is looking for
It should be remembered that CBDCs are digital currencies controlled by the central banks of different countries, while cryptocurrencies are almost always decentralized.
And, in that sense, Georgieva considers that the lack of agreement on a common platform creates a void that cryptocurrencies would likely fill.
There are already 114 central banks that are in some phase of exploring CBDCs, “with about 10 having already crossed the finish line,” he said. “If countries develop CBDCs only for domestic deployment, we are underutilizing their capacity,” he added.
CBDCs could also help promote financial inclusion and make remittances cheaper, he said, noting that the average cost of money transfers stands at 6.3%, which means 44,000 million dollars a year.
Georgieva stressed that CBDCs must be asset-backed, adding that cryptocurrencies are an investment opportunity when they are asset-backed, but when they are not they are a “speculative investment.”
Source: Ambito
