Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
March 01, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- The Republic of the
Marshall Islands will become the first sovereign nation to issue a
cryptocurrency that will be legal tender, aka "real money". The
Marshall Islands is a country of 60,000 people spread out over
numerous small islands located near the equator in the Pacific
Ocean.
The “Sovereign” blockchain platform token, “SOV” for short, will
be sold to the public through an ICO. The SOV will circulate as
legal tender in the Marshall Islands by late 2018 alongside the
current local currency, the U.S. dollar.
Cash raised from the Marshall Islands ICO, expected to be
several hundreds of millions of USD, will go towards, among other
things:
- Healthcare for the country’s older citizens, many of whom suffer
health problems resulting from above ground nuclear testing done by
the US from 1946 to 1958. (The U.S. already pays $30 million a year
as compensation)
- A contingency fund meant to mitigate the effects of rising sea
levels on the low-lying island country.
- Green energy infrastructure.
- Universal internet access for the county's smaller and less
populated islands and islets.
“This is a historic moment for our people, finally issuing and
using our own currency, alongside the US dollar. It is another step
of manifesting our national liberty,” President Hilda Heine
said.
National pride may be a driving factor moving more small
countries towards the establishment of a national cryptocurrency as
legal tender. David Paul, Environment Minister of the Marshall
Islands, said that “The Marshall Islands is the first nation to
adopt a transparent crypto monetary system, and we are proud of it.
We are excited to be the world’s first nation to leapfrog into the
era of digital currencies.”
SOV has the benefits of cryptocurrency plus the legal and
regulatory framework that covers sovereign currencies. So, though
it will be the legal tender of a relatively tiny economy, the
impact of the SOV on legitimizing cryptocurrencies as real money is
expected to be huge.
Venezuela has claimed that its Petro is the world's first
sovereign cryptocurrency. But the Marshall Islands has taken issue
with that claim, noting that the SOV will be, by national law just
enacted by the Marshall Islands Parliament, the legal tender of the
country, whereas the Petro is not. The SOV will be a decentralized
cryptocurrency with a price determined by the free market, whereas
the Petro's value is pegged to a commodity, a barrel of Venezuelan
oil, whose price can be manipulated at will by the Venezuelan
government.
Y-combinator startup Neema is the Marshall Islands ICO partner.
Neema first initiated a process whereby it would find a country
with which to partner to create a cryptocurrency which would become
the legal tender of that country.
“SOV is the promising starting point for the adoption of
cryptocurrencies by sovereign nations,” said Peter Dittus, former
secretary general of the Bank of International Settlements and
Neema’s senior economic advisor. He went on to say that the SOV’s
“…protocol provides a promising balance between transparency and
privacy and we’re excited to develop it further. It is state of the
art technology, put to good use, with the right values in mind and
a clear purpose.”
By: BGN Editorial Staff