Vitalik Buterin has spoken out and said that it’s unlikely that central banks will have the ability to create their own digital currencies.
The 23-year-old Russian national was speaking earlier this week at the three-day Swell event in Toronto, hosted by Ripple.
Even though several central banks are working on creating their own digital currencies Buterin isn’t concerned about the competition they may create. Furthermore, he believes that it will take years for banks to achieve their goal, reports Fortune.
He said:
If there is [such a launch] it will be a server and a bunch of marketing buzzwords to make it look like a blockchain.
His comments come at a time when the cryptocurrency market is experiencing a surge in price levels. At the time of publishing, bitcoin is trading over $5,600 and ethereum is valued at $309 while the combined market cap is worth $168.8 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
With the continued rise in market prices interest is also being focused on the blockchain. Used primarily within the finance sector, the distributed ledger is seeing use cases within industries such as energy, humanitarian, supply chain, healthcare, and education.
Earlier this month it was reported that Japan’s three ‘megabanks’ – Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial – had united on a blockchain project with Japanese IT giant Fujitsu to conduct person-to-person money transfers between individuals. India’s biggest banks are also planning to form a consortium to test an interbank blockchain platform before introducing it on a wider scale.
Due to the heightened interest in the blockchain many countries are already in the process of considering their own digital currencies.
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said this week that the country will have its own state-issued cryptocurrency, the CryptoRuble. Whereas, Dubai has revealed that it will develop and introduce its own blockchain-powered digital currency, known as emCash. It’s reported that citizens will be able to pay for government and non-government services with it.
Yet, despite these advances with some nations, Buterin doesn’t appear concerned. Until countries actually make their ideas a reality, digital currencies such as bitcoin and ethereum will remain at the forefront.