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- The United Kingdom’s overseas territory, Bermuda, will pilot a digital Bermuda Dollar based on the Stellar blockchain.
- Initially, the Bermuda dollar can only be used to purchase rum from Gosling’s Limited, while expansion to other companies is planned.
As the news portal Coindesk reports, the Canadian company Bidali will pilot a digital Bermuda Dollar on the archipelago in the North Atlantic. The technical basis for the digital Bermuda Dollar will be the Stellar blockchain, with only the popular local rum company Gosling’s Limited initially accepting the currency as part of the project.
According to the report, the first phase of the project is being coordinated by Penrose Partners, a Canadian and Bermudian consulting firm. As Eric Kryski, CEO and co-founder of Bidali explained, he hopes that the Bermuda Dollar can be expanded to other businesses in Bermuda.
Bermuda – an ideal venue for digital currency experimentation
Bidali has already been exploring Bermuda since 2018 as a way to bring cryptocurrency payments into the mainstream. Kryski led in a blog post that 60,000 people are enough “to demonstrate meaningful production use before scaling to more sophisticated environments.”
Bermuda, meanwhile, has presented itself as an attractive jurisdiction for the crypto space since 2018, after the government passed the Digital Assets Business Act (DABA), which creates a sandbox for digital asset innovation.
Denis Pitcher, chief fintech advisor to Premier E. David Burt, outlined that Bermuda does not have access to alternative payment platforms, such as PayPal or Square, so the solution has the potential to connect Bermuda to the global financial system. “Our aim is to try and get the Bermuda dollar digitized on every public blockchain. Then, the markets and citizens will figure out what the best solution is,” Pitcher told CoinDesk.
In line with that, Kryski said they won’t force a solution on the country. The archipelago has experimented with stablecoins in the past, including the USD Coin (USDC) issued by the CENTRE consortium, which could be used to pay taxes. Pitcher agreed to Kryski, stating:
It’s not our position to say which tech is going to solve the problem. It’s our position to look at what are the risks and how we make sure they’re managed. … Your customers may want to be able to pay in USDC or they may want to pay in a variety of assets. So it’s about enabling that kind of choice.
