Three years ago, Estonia became one of the first countries in the world to launch their e-residency program and in those three years, this program turned to be a very successful idea of the Estonian government. In those three years, 22,000 people from all parts of the world have used the advantages of that program such as the opportunity to get the digital ID from the government that those people use when they register a company in the country. With the e-residency program, a person is not obliged to have a permanent residence in Estonia to register a firm and all that he or she needs is the digital ID provided by the government through the e-residency.
Besides that, people who obtained digital ID are allowed to have the access to the banking system of the country as well as the opportunity to sign documents without being physically present in the country. For the past three years, this program has seen a lot of success and now Estonian government seems to be ready to take this initiative to a whole new level.
Estcoin in the making
According to several news reports, Estonian government is also thinking about launching their own token or digital currency and they would apparently use ICO or Initial Coin Offering in to achieve that. According to Kaspar Korjus who is currently the director of e-residency program in Estonia, the name of that token or cryptocurrency would be ‘estcoin’.
Estonia is not the first country who attempted to do this because China has already been developing this idea for quite some time. However, at this moment, it seems that Estonia is the only country in the world that has infrastructure that is required for such a move. When we talk about the infrastructure we mean the e-residency program that Estonian officials have already identified as the primary instrument in achieving this goal.
Korjus has been flirting with this idea for quite some time and after several market analyses have been conducted with this idea as the main guideline, he believes that estcoin or whatever name it happens to get, could be used in public as well as in private sector mostly for paying services in the country’s borders. However, Korjus also believes that carefully developed estcoin could have a potential to become much more and there is only one idea in Korjus’s mind and that is estcoin becoming viable currency all over the world.
Despite these big announcements, Korjus has emphasized that estcoin is still in its early stages of development and that despite the available digital infrastructure estcoin is still far from being launched. Korjus has said that this project is not a simple one and that they want to test the public’s opinion about this issue and that is one of the reasons why the development of estcoin is going so slowly.
According to some reports, Estonians are welcoming the idea of their own digital currency but that is still not enough for this project to gain traction. When the government gets convinced that public means seriously, a pilot project will have to be launched and almost everything will depend on the successfulness of that pilot project.
Written by Vedran Ostojic
