Malta’s Prime Minister, Dr. Joseph Muscat, addressed the United Nations General Assembly this week in a speech that touted his country’s leadership role in embracing and promoting new technological innovation. He noted that his country has worked to “regularize” blockchain technology and told the assembled world representatives that cryptocurrencies are the “inevitable future of money.”

Muscat began his speech by citing a litany of global concerns ranging from lingering poverty and disease to injustice and climate change. He stressed the importance of harnessing new technologies to address those and other problems, suggesting that “each incredible piece of new innovation could hold a new solution to a problem we may have been persisting with for decades, from advanced robotics and artificial intelligence, to 3D printing and the Internet of Things.”

The Prime Minister acknowledged that the transition to a digital economy is not without challenges, noting that many people around the world cling to “concepts that we have believed would stay with us forever” – concepts like the meaning of work, compensation for labor, and the state’s role in providing safety nets for citizens. He also observed that some of the resistance will come from those who are afraid that the new emerging economy will result in massive job losses and additional poverty.

In Muscat’s view, the opposite will be true for nations that can quickly adapt to and embrace the new digital age:

“Those who will be able to pair the digital economy with a new state, the digital state, will be best poised to have a futureproof society where change does not galvanise extremes, but provides for other decades of sensible, mainstream policymaking and prosperity.”

According to Prime Minister Muscat, his country is committed to living up to its potential as the Blockchain Island. He credited blockchain technology as the reason why digital currencies will inevitably become the future of money and then extolled the technology’s potential benefits in fields like health care, emissions trading, data management and self-empowerment, and organized humanitarian assistance.