Ex-CFTC Chairman: Libra Could Help In Prioritizing The Digital Dollar

The ex-CFTC chairman Christopher Giancarlo wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal that said now is a good chance to start considering a digital US dollar which will be based on the blockchain system, as we are reading in the Libra news today.

Giancarlo proposed the idea of making the US dollar digital with the help of the blockchain-based system and gained a lot of attention from the community. Giancarlo publicly proposed the idea last year and now, the digital dollar project has gone under many modifications especially in the past few months. One of the few companies to partner up and aim for central bank digital currency is Accenture. However, there were many reports that the central banking institution in the US could not give the green light for this asset to be developed and released to the public.

Speaking in an interview recently, the EX-CFTC chairman made the claim that the institutions should come up with ideas such as Facebook’s Libra and the Chinese Digital currency which only proves the fact that the US should consider the facts that will make a decent digital dollar project and a priority to the nation. Giancarlo even suggested that the current financial structure is being overwhelmed and added that the government has to come up with better ideas that would see the currency system improved about ten times, in a manner never seen before:

 “We need to look at the architecture of our fiat currency. A lot of what’s being developed today commercially are workarounds for the lack of digital infrastructure for our own fiat currency.”

However, Once Mastercard left Libra, the company started investigating the potential use of the project. Banga appeared to have concerns when association members would also not firmly commit to the controls of data management including the know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) legislation. Visa, on the other hand, had pulled out because the project had not been able to “satisfy all requisite regulatory expectations” as a spokesperson later confirmed. Out of the 28 founding members of the Libra project, eight have left. The British telecom conglomerate Vodafone was the last leaving in January 2020 when it decided to focus on its own digital payments service.