It has been announced that the Central Bank in Ukraine will be increasing the size of the team that is currently working to transfer the national currency, the hryvnia, into a blockchain format.
The exact number of additions to the team and who these people are will be kept confidential for the time being, but this commitment to expand showcases just how much of an emphasis the Ukrainian Central Bank is placing on the blockchain, something which has not really been seen elsewhere to date.
They said in the announcement that the team was bolstered with world-class professionals and the bank is optimistic about the success that this team may achieve in the not too distant future. This announcement was made by the central bank’s acting governor, Yakiv Smolii.
Although these details of the project have indeed remained private, it was revealed in the past few days that Distributed Lab, which is based in Ukraine, will be helping with this project.
The founder of Distributed Lab is Pavel Kravchenko and he has admitted that they are playing some sort of role in this project in terms of the architecture, the security analysis and the research and development associated with it.
While all across the entire world there have been central banks who have been actively discussing the topic of blockchain technology and how it may integrate with their own currencies, not much headway has been made.
Blockchain technology is the way of the future thanks to its various capabilities such as being able to track funds in a more efficient manner and to cut down on the many expenses that are associated with commercial banks.
In China recently, the People’s Bank talked about how it was important for there to be a fiat-based cryptocurrency created as it is a crucial financial development.
Ukraine’s National Bank has taken this theoretical approach further than any other central bank and it is going to be interesting to watch how the evolution of their national digital currency turns out and what effect this has on the rest of the world. It might not be long before other central banks are embarking on similar projects.
It was back in November of 2016 that the bank first started working on this project and they have been sending survey requests to many of the commercial banks in the country in order to further understand the role they are willing to play in this evolution and how much support they will show for a national fiat currency that utilises blockchain.
As a result, the Central Bank in Ukraine has been looking at different cases across the world as to how other successful users of blockchain technology have fared using different approaches, systems and techniques.
This study of the best practices is aimed at proving the effectiveness of their project, helping them to avoid potential pitfalls that afflicted others in the past. This is a very exciting time as the very first form of a national digital currency could be seen in the near future.
Good post by the way, thank you Vlad
What is actually the block chain?