Tunisia became the first country to issue central bank digital currency

Tunisia has announced the launch of its digital version of the national currency Dinar (Dinar), a small North African country that became the first country in the world to issue the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

According to the Russian state news agency Tass, Tunisia has established a partnership with the Russian company Universa to distribute E-Dinar through Universa's blockchain platform. On the line, the Tunisian Central Bank Governor Marouane El Abassi and the representative of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made a nominal 1 dinars transfer.

Let Dinar go international

When everyone expected China to become the first country to issue digital currency, Tunisia ran out. Obviously, E-dinar is not a cryptocurrency, and it is significantly different from Venezuelan's petroleum. Tunisia did not create a new currency such as a coin, but only digitized the existing currency.

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In the next few months, people will be able to use E-Dinar in thousands of stores, cafes and restaurants. E-Dinar will be distributed online or at two thousand convenience points in the country.

In addition to making domestic transactions more convenient, Tunisia has an ambitious goal: to bring Dinar to the international arena. The Tunisian central bank wants to eliminate the need for dollars in cross-border payments.

Tunisia also hopes to break away from the widely used SWIFT payment system, which can close any country's payment channels at any time. With E-Dinar, the Tunisian central bank can always control.

Private sector participation in central bank digital currency

Although Universa is a technology partner of E-Dinar, Tunisia may have given it too much power. The company will charge a certain percentage of the fees for each transaction made on the system. However, the company claims that it will not have access to any encryption keys and has no access to view transaction records.

Universa CEO Alexander Borodich believes that the cost is completely worthwhile because “electronic banknotes cannot be forged – just as each banknote has its own digital watermark, each digital banknote is password protected. The cost is 100 times cheaper than the ink, paper and electricity that the printer wastes."

The involvement of the private sector in the central bank’s digital currency may be the norm. For China's central bank digital currency, the private sector can also operate infrastructure. Mu Changchun, director of the Digital Money Institute of the People's Bank of China, said on the 10th at the "10th Caixin Summit: Open China and the World" that private institutions can operate infrastructure, but there are conditions behind them. In the legal supervision framework, at the same time, it is necessary to serve supervision and serve the public, and requires a high level of public morality. The central bank's digital currency introduced a two-tier operating system from the outset, using private and public sectors to build digital currency. In the future, private power may be used to jointly build public goods.

As more and more countries enter the digital currency field, the CBDC war will intensify. Malaysia, the Philippines, Argentina, Brazil and China are all developing their own digital currencies, and Singapore, Thailand and Canada are also seriously considering them.

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