Estonia Drop Out Of The Sovereign Cryptocurrency Race

All of a sudden, it seems as if every country wants to make its own cryptocurrency. Whether that is a FIAT based stable coin, an external asset or even just the notion of sovereign coin research, we are hearing news from a wealth of outlets that is reporting some very healthy movements from central banks and authorities that are, at least, looking into the procedures surrounding cryptocurrency production. The list of countries is truly endless; South Korea, Thailand, South Africa, The United Kingdom, Norway and, until now, Estonia, to name but a few. According to a new report by Bloomberg, Estonia are now moving their efforts away from a Euro x Crypto tether type currency, which initially, seemed to be in production with the view to issue units out to Estonian citizens. According to Bloomberg:

“Estonia have scaled down its plan to create a national cryptocurrency after it drew criticism from Mario Draghi and local banking authorities. The Baltic country dropped plans to peg these digital tokens to the euro or offer them to all citizens, Siim Sikkut, an official in charge of the country’s IT strategy, said in an interview in Tallinn. Instead, they will be given as an incentive to e-residents, foreigners who use Estonia’s electronic identification to remotely sign documents and set up companies, he said.”

See the full report for yourself, here- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-01/estonia-curbs-cryptocurrency-plan-that-drew-rebuke-from-draghi So, what does all of this mean? Firstly, efforts in Estonia have not been in vain. Whilst the currency notion seems to have been abandoned, authorities still wish to use a token (possibly named Estcoin) as a part of their e-residency programme, which is currently used to issue identity cards to 35,000 foreign residents from areas such as Russia and Ukraine. So, whilst the initial plan for Estcoin did promise to work along side the Euro, now it seems that the blockchain is going to be used within an entirely new experiment, as it stands though, the full nature of Estcoin as a currency for identification is pretty unclear. This of course doesn’t mean that Estonia won’t jump back on board soon enough, we perhaps could see Estonian authorities tap back into this space, once this new plan for Estcoin becomes more established, perhaps this is just a case of scaling the plan down, in order to run a quick social experiment. If this is the case, it’s a very sensible move indeed.