Is crypto’s value being lost with central-bank digital currencies emerging?

• The world of crypto is gaining more attention from users and central banks. 
• With many governments announcing that they are planning to develop their own central-bank digital currency, the world of crypto is the one to watch.

The world of cryptocurrency is gaining more attention and adoption from a wide variety of users and central banks are now trying to make the most of the emerging industry. With many governments announcing that they are planning to develop and potentially release their own central-bank digital currency, the world of crypto is the one to watch.

Even France has recently started developing its own digital euro with China also moving their efforts for a CBDC. But with all of this going on at once, many asking the question of whether these ideals of crypto are now being subverted together.

In a recent podcast, Lex Sokolin, Fintech Co-head at ConsenSys and Olivia Vinden discussed the growing interest of adoption and development areas of CBDC and where it could go within the financial ecosystem. Sokolin was the first to highlight that since the popularity of bitcoin and crypto has gone up, the time for central-bank digital currencies is just around the corner. He further said:

“There is certainly a critical mass about signaling the interest in CBDCs right now. I think the pressure has been building from Bitcoin to then an order of magnitude, of sort of threat with Libra and now  I think COVID-19 actually has quite a bit of impact on the sector.”

This is on top of the decrease in the use of cash in the economy such as the UK. In the bank of England discussion paper, they regarded its own central vantage till currency and said that it makes it a suitable time for more central banks across the world to seriously consider such initiatives. However the co-head pointed out that even with France’s plan of developing a digital euro there are still worries when it comes to privacy given everything going on with the pandemic of coronavirus. She further said:

“I’m glad that they said it is not intended to replace cash and coins because actually just with a little sort of Corona hat on, I think we all need to be really careful about creeping government surveillance of things that we’re doing.”

It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!