“Digital currencies of the Central Bank will appear in the next five years”

Financial experts at ING, a Dutch bank, are confident that the emergence of “fully functional digital currencies of the Central Banks” is only a matter of time.

“We expect the emergence of digital currencies of central banks over the next five years,” they wrote in an article published on Monday on the THINK banking analytics platform.

“The current financial infrastructure is not coping with its responsibilities. It is expensive to maintain, requires a lot of time, and makes it difficult to ensure legal compliance. Meanwhile, government digital currency can be fast, cheap, and easy to use. Its appearance will mean a huge leap forward, ”says Teunis Brosens, ING’s leading digital finance economist.

“Along with the emergence of state digital currencies, conditions will appear for the implementation of a number of new opportunities,” added ING chief economist Mark Cliffe.

However, not everyone agrees with this statement. For example, IMF economist Priscilla Toffano noted that much more time is needed before the digital currencies of central banks become a reality.

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Earlier, the head of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation Elvira Nabiullina said that now there are no prerequisites for issuing a state cryptocurrency.

“We have carefully examined the possibilities and have not yet discovered the obvious advantages of this initiative. It’s not just technological reasons. It’s not yet clear how a digital currency will be better, for example, of existing electronic non-cash payments, ”she said.