According to the Bloomberg report, the Swedish central bank, Riksbank, launched a review for e-krona on Friday. The country’s government is considering a transformation of the monetary system towards digital currency. The central bank’s former Finance Committee Chairwoman will lead the review process, which is expected to be completed by the end of November 2022. The Swedish Monetary Regulator Governor, Stefan Ingves, earlier said that any decision to introduce e-krona has to come from the political level.
Sweden’s central bank is piloting e-Krona.
Since the beginning of this year, Sweden has already been piloting e-Krona in a partnership with the information technology giant Accenture. The digital currency is issued on R3’s Corda blockchain, a popular distributed ledger for private usage. However, at that time, the central bank clarified that the pilot project was only for the learning experience, and it had no intention to launch a digital currency. The central bank’s research found that less than 10 percent of all the transactions in Sweden are settled in cash, and the ongoing pandemic has further boosted the usage of digital transactions.
Central banks continue to explore digital currencies.
Sweden’s Financial Markets Minister, Per Bolund, said that it is crucial that the digitalized payments market functions safely and that it’s available to everybody. Some smaller countries have already issued their central bank-backed digital currency. As reported earlier, the Cayman island launched a national cryptocurrency this year. Central banks of Canada, Japan, the Philippines, and many others are actively exploring CBDCs. Central banks worldwide are now actively exploring central bank digital currencies and making plans for real-world testing. China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, has been working on the national digital currency for the last five to six years and is now very close to issuing it to the general public.
