Perhaps the Bahamas will be the first country in the world to launch its own digital currency. The national cryptocurrency will be called “Sand Dollar” and will appear in October.
As stated by Chaozhen Chen, assistant manager of eSolutons at the Central Bank of the Bahamas, the central bank-issued digital money will help make financial services more accessible on the country’s remote islands. Citizens will have the option to use their mobile devices to use the Sand Dollar.
“Many of the outlying islands’ residents lack access to banks and digital payment infrastructure. We had to work hard to come up with a solution that the state needed,” Chen said.
The Sand Dollar will be regulated similarly to the Bahamian dollar, Chen said. The same anti-money laundering and terrorist financing laws will be applied to digital currency as there are for the fiat currency. In addition, to create a digital wallet, the user will have to go through a verification procedure.
The Bahamas Central Bank intends to be issuing its new digital currency on demand, while issuing Sand Dollars will remove a similar amount of paper money from circulation. This will allow the introduction of government cryptocurrency without affecting monetary policy.
Earlier it was reported that the Bahamas Central Bank added its own digital currency to the official annual balance sheet. The sum of Sand Dollars issued as part of the pilot project was worth $48,000.
