Sweden Piles On To The Crypto Arms Race, Joins China and Other Countries

As the proverbial arms race steadily starts to speed up in the crypto industry, more and more central banks are pushing for a centralized cryptocurrency. Yesterday, South Korea made headlines for doing it, but now Sweden has taken over the day’s news.

Ready To Start the Pilot

As it stands now, the Swedish central bank is ready to sign a deal with Accenture, a multinational professional services firm. Through this deal, the country will initiate the pilot testing of its e-krona, the CBDC. Reports claim that the partnership will initially only run for a year, ending at the end of 2020.

Riksbank gave a public statement about the matter. The firm explained that the e-krona’s pilot project’s primary objective is the further the bank’s understanding of the e-krona’s technological potential.

Declining Demands of Cash

The Scandinavian country has already started to experience an overall decline in cash usage, something that served as motivation for Sweden’s central bank. According to the Swedish blog aksjebloggen, the central bank has been investigating a digital alternative since the year of 2017

The partnership with the Accenture firm will focus on a payment platform’s development that incorporates a user interface (UI). This UI will enable transactions to be done with e-krona and will be available on both cards and smartphones. Although there has been no direct confirmation that the e-krona will be fully developed, the likelihood of that happening is very high.

The Crypto “Space Race”

Rhythm Trader, an industry observer, likened the new race for cryptocurrencies as the “space race of our generation.” However, Rhythm believes that Bitcoin is the superior coin to all forms.

BREAKING: Sweden just announced the launch of the "e-krona", it's own central bank digital currency in a new pilot platform.

Digital currencies are the space race of our generation.

However, my bet is on Bitcoin getting to the moon first.

— Rhythm (@Rhythmtrader) December 13, 2019

Sweden has been more active in the crypto industry compared to its other neighbors. In fact, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority (SFSA) has approved Amun, a Switzerland-based crypto exchange-traded product (ETP) provider. This happened earlier this week.

The announcement claimed that Amun was the first issuer that was capable of delivering passive investment products that are fully collateralized and with crypto as its underlying assets. The firm plans on taking further steps to spread into the European Union as a whole in order to provide it with Amun’s ETPs.

Sweden is only the newest addition to a growing list of central banks partaking in research for a Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC. Yesterday, South Korea’s central bank was hiring blockchain experts for their move. The day before that, Lithuania was in the spotlight for publishing a research paper regarding CBDC’s feasibility.