Podcast: Manufacturing Digital Currency

A discussion exploring how digital fiat currency can replicate the operational characteristics of physical cash while enabling faster and more efficient digital transactions.

130 central banks around the world are now exploring the merits of issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) but as recently as 2015 not a single one was doing that, even though the idea of digital money dates back to the 1990s.

The founders of eCurrency, on the other hand, a Dublin-headquartered company with deep roots in Silicon Valley, have been thinking about CBDCs ever since the great financial crisis of 2007-09. Unlike Satoshi Nakamoto, however, their concern was not to use technology to create a trustless, peer-to-peer alternative to the failed fiat currency system controlled by central bank and commercial bank intermediaries, but to rejuvenate central bank money by making it available to households and consumers via the Internet.

eCurrency now offers a technology that enables central banks to mint a purely digital form of fiat currency that functions as a bearer instrument – an Internet version, if you like, of physical notes and coins.

Dominic Hobson, co-founder of Future of Finance, spoke to Jonathan Dharmapalan, CEO of eCurrency.  

Listen to the podcast