According to IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, the International Monetary Fund is developing a platform for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) to allow transactions between countries.
“CBDCs should not be fragmented national propositions… To have more efficient and fairer transactions, we need systems that connect countries: we need interoperability,” Georgieva said at a conference attended by African central banks in Rabat, Morocco.
“For this reason at the IMF, we are working on the concept of a global CBDC platform,” she said.
The IMF wants central banks to settle on a standard regulatory scheme for virtual currencies that will allow collaboration on a global basis. She mentioned that the absence of a unified platform would leave a void that cryptocurrencies would probably fill.
Cryptocurrencies are almost always decentralized while a CBDC is a digital currency managed by the central bank.
Already, 114 central banks are at some stage of CBDC exploration, “with about 10 already crossing the finish line”, she said.
“If countries develop CDBCs only for domestic deployment we are underutilizing their capacity,” she added.
She added that the mean cost of remittances is 6.3%, or $44 billion annually, and that CBDCs could help boost financial inclusion and lower remittance costs.
Georgieva emphasized the need for assets to support CBDCs and said that when they are, cryptocurrencies present an investment opportunity, but when they are not, they are merely “speculative investments.”
