Cryptocurrencies to be the subject of two meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos ฿

By AtipikNews | Atipik | 26 Jan 2021

Two sessions dedicated to crypto-currencies and central bank digital currencies (MNBC) will be held at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

(The organization, based in Geneva, has even created a working group that focuses on crypto-currency and blockchain).

Two sessions on crypto-currencies

The World Economic Forum in Davos, which opens on Monday, will include two separate sessions on crypto-currencies, which shows some interest from policy makers.

The sessions, entitled "Resetting Digital Currencies", will be held today and Thursday. The first session will feature five speakers, including Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and Hikmet Ersek, President of Western Union.

Thursday's meeting will feature four speakers, including Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Minister of the Government of Singapore, and Zhu Min, President of the Beijing-based National Institute for Financial Research.

Both sessions will focus on the declining role of cash and the emergence of digital central bank currencies, particularly in the context of the pandemic.

A working group

The World Economic Forum is devoting more resources to understanding blockchain technology and crypto-currency. The organization, which is therefore based in Geneva, has even created a working group to study these two subjects.

It also published its first report in December, which focuses on the different cases of use of digital assets "beyond price and speculation". The research cited the blockchain as a key driver for "sustainable digital finance". Researchers say that this technology could increase "the value of existing digital systems".

Digital central bank currencies, or DCBMs, are one of the areas of research the Forum has been working on over the past 18 months. In January 2020, the organization announced that it had developed a framework to help banks "assess, design and eventually deploy an MNBC. This framework was developed in collaboration with central banks, financial institutions and academic researchers.