Japan: the digital Yen arrives, but private …

A consortium of around 70 Japanese companies said this week that it plans to launch a yen-based cryptocurrency in 2022, according to Reuters . of the country: Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group said at a press conference on Wednesday that they have met since last year to build a shared settlement infrastructure for digital payments.

The consortium includes the East Japan Railway Company and the Kansai Electric Power Company. They plan to start testing the currency in the next few months, ie early 2022. The experiment is separate from the Bank of Japan's work on the digital yen, the real CBDC (Central bank Digital Currency) under study in Tokyo and which will follow the evolution of China.

Despite what is commonly thought, Japan is a high-tech, but cash-loving country. As of 2018, 80% of all retail transactions in the country were completed in banknotes and coins. It is something that the government of Japan has tried to change over time, also with a view to improving the productivity of the country, but which has always been strongly rejected by citizens, who love hard cash, rustling banknotes and protection of privacy. The creation of a non-public, but private digital yen could give the Japanese a feeling of protection that has hitherto kept them away from electronic payments. After all, in the perspective of a dystopian world based exclusively on digital payments, the best protection can come from the support of public and private solutions with different degrees of transparency and guarantee. Then it is the individual who chooses the best solution for him.

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The article Japan: the digital Yen arrives, but private… comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/yen-digitale/ on Fri, 26 Nov 2021 10:30:02 +0000.