Can Blockchain support a digital Euro?  

Estonia’s Central Bank Eesti Pank undertaking research on the possibility of Blockchain supporting the Euro.  

Last Friday in a news release, Eesti Pank announced an initiative that will calculate if KSI Blockchain is a suitable supporting system for a central bank digital currency (CBDC).  The Estonian government already considers KSI as a substantial part of the country’s e-government system, and so this research will be carried out with help from Guardtime, the Estonian company that developed the KSI Blockchain. 

The research seems to be focused mainly on new payment solutions that might evolve as people use more e-ID’s and other local governmental solutions, although the government has stated that the approach will be ‘technology agnostic’. Eesti Pank continued to say that user habits are constantly changing and now all the more so what with the pandemic and the way it has affected social relations.

Head of the central bank’s Payment and Settlement Systems Department Rainer Olt said that Estonia’s experience working with a digital form of government “gives [the central bank] good grounds for launching a project to explore the technological frontiers of digital money.”