“Pandemic accelerates need to consider digital currency: Bank of Canada”
The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the public’s use of online services and that means the Bank of Canada must move more quickly to research how a central bank digital product would work, a top official said on Wednesday.
A digital currency would act like cash and streamline transactions by avoiding a need to use a payment card for online purchases.
The Bank of Canada has started work on its own digital currency should others become widely used in Canada and erode the central bank’s ability to manage monetary policy, but earlier this year officials believed they had a long timeline to create one before the Canadian dollar wasn’t used for most transactions.
The work builds on six-plus years of research into the growth of volatile digital currencies like Bitcoin and stablecoins that maintain a stable value, as the name implies. Among the new batch of stablecoins getting attention is Facebook’s Libra, which Lane is scheduled to address during a panel appearance Thursday.
Never let a crisis go to waste…