The Central Bank of the Bahamas has recently announced a key collaboration for the creation of a digital fiat currency system in the country. The project, which will be called Project Sand Dollar, was unveiled via an official document released last Friday, March 1.
This new initiative has the goal of providing equal access to digital payments for the people in the country and to reduce the costs of this kind of service. The pilot which is starting to be done will be focused on improving the operational efficiency of the service and to understand better how to promote inclusion using this new service.
According to the official documents, the main business partnership that the government will have when dealing with this will be NZIA.io, a transaction provider. The company is known for its work with IBM. Another important company will be Zynesis, which is based in Singapore and offers blockchain solutions to its users.
The central bank has also affirmed that it will start a conversation with the companies soon in order to agree on the final terms of this collaboration and to define the scope of the project more clearly, which will be the final step before starting the pilot for good.
Another important announcement made by the bank was that the new digital fiat currency that will be created by the country will be fully compliant with the local regulation (which was kind of obvious, really) and that it will follow the Central Bank of Bahamas Bill, which was approved recently.
With a new strong regulatory framework, the bank is ready to tackle money laundering and terrorist financing with the structure of this new digital currency, as to ensure that the project will be accepted worldwide and that it will not open holes for criminal activities.
The first time that the central bank of the country has talked about this project was in 2018. At the time, the deputy prime minister of the country and the minister of finances claimed that this new project would be very important for the Bahamas as many banks have left people in the country without banking services as they moved elsewhere in the last decade.
