Kelly Robertson
Uruguay’s central bank, the Banco Central del Uruguay (BDC), is preparing to test its very own digital currency. Under the deal, a limited number of users would help test a mobile app for the transfer of funds.
According to the Bank’s President Mario Bergara, the digital currency would function like cash, allowing for balances to be passed between individuals.
“It’s not that you use the phone to order money transfers, as is done today, but having bills in the cellular and being able to pass them on from one user to another,” he told the Latin American Herald Tribune.
It is, however, not clear whether Uruguay will opt for a blockchain-based platform or will instead go for a more traditional, centralized system. We would guess that any new system would want to rely on a public ledger to make for a that much more secure transactions, but you never know.
While central banks all around the world have expressed interest for blockchain, we have yet to see any concrete results of their commitments. Sure, some specialty/boutique banks may be testing technology with select client, but the wide-scale launch is still at least a year away.
In any case, we are glad to see countries like Uruguay pushing beyond their limits to innovate in this space.
Unfortunately though, we don’t have any dates to share, only that the pilot is “fairly close” to launch, according to Bergara, who added that certain technological aspects of the program still had to be finalized. “It will be a process of trial and error, success and failures,” he said.
Home of the SMS bitcoin payment system
In the “Bitcoin world,” Uruguay is best known as a home of the SMS bitcoin payment system Moneero.
Said service is designed to make bitcoin easy for anyone to use. “We want to make it easy and convenient for non-tech savvy people,” the company’s chief programming officer Steven Morell told CoinDesk at the time of the service launch a few years ago. “People who have heard about bitcoin in the news, and would buy it if it were easy for them.”
As part of its mission to bring Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to the masses, Moneero has teamed-up with a company to build a Bitcoin ATM, which is also known as a BTM. That partnership relies on Moneero’s bitcoin transaction API to enable Bitcoin transactions using a physical machine.
The wider South American region is one of the biggest crypto-markets in the world, and this latest move by the Uruguay’s central bank could further cement the region’s role in the new decentralized economy. More to come, obviously.
