I’m Ashton Addison from EventChain.io and this is the Crypto Coin Show.

Where I decrypt the facts, to keep you on track in the crypto world.

Ashton Adison on Ethereum and the SIngaporean dollar

Today’s Crypto Topic: Singapore and Ethereum blockchain

The Singaporean dollar has been successfully tokenized on a private Ethereum blockchain by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. While the Bank of Canada, Bank of England, and People’s Bank of China have experimented with tokening their national currencies on a blockchain, this is the first time a central bank has successfully tokenized their currency in a truly historic event.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore, or the MAS for short, teamed up with a number of other banks and blockchain technology firms in Asia to complete phase 1 of tokenizing the national Singaporean dollar on a private Ethereum blockchain. Their seconds phase focuses on distributed cross-border payments, domestic payment research, and improving domestic securities transactions.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is pleased to present the report “Project Ubin: SGD on Distributed Ledger”. The exciting announcement was published by MAS in co-operation with Deloitte, and the PDF is available at the bottom of this article.

On 16 November 2016, MAS first announced that it was partnering with R3 — a Blockchain inspired technology company and consortium of the world’s largest financial institutions — on the production of a proof-of-concept (PoC) to conduct inter-bank payments facilitated by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

The genesis block of this new private blockchain was mined by one of two operating MAS nodes. Two MAS nodes and eight other bank nodes verify the network of the private Ethereum Blockchain.

Keep in mind this is a private Ethereum blockchain. Lots of progress has been made on private Ethereum blockchain’s for corporations and monetary authorities through the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) which has grown over three fold in Asia this year and is opening a new office up in Hangzhou.

Banks in Canada, England, and China have all trialed tokenizing their currencies, but Singapore is the first to announce a successful token. The Bank of Canada originally experimented with currency tokenization through R3’s project jasper, but Singapore opted to use the Ethereum Blockchain protocol, which I believe has the best interoperability, security, and most potential out of any blockchain technology right now.

Which country will tokenize their currency on a blockchain next? Will it be on a Ethereum Blockchain? According to Andrew Keys from ConsenSys, it seems the PBOC’s current focus is to tokenize the Yuan on an Ethereum network at some point. I think this step forward by Singapore will bring a lot of positive public awareness to the Ethereum network and Ether as a store of value, even though it won’t directly affect the Ethereum public blockchain.

There are many benefits to tokenizing a national currency on Distributed Ledger Technology. Some expect the decrease in counterparty risk from using a blockchain network will reduce collateral requirements for governmental trades. The publication shows 80% of banks will initiate some kind of DLT technology by 2017, with 24+ other countries investing in Blockchain infrastructure. The question of whether private Ethereum blockchains are best fit Blockchain for these national currencies in the long term remains to be seen.

I believe that even if this creates a centralization discussion on the benefits and drawbacks on private versus public blockchains, any national press for Ethereum will help aids in its growth and development and the value of Ether.

If your countries central bank used an Ethereum private blockchain for their new currency, would you be ok with it? I think it’s an improvement over traditional fiat currencies like the dollar, but it’s still not the a true decentralized currency of the people. Then again, Ether isn’t really either. In fact, I believe Bitcoin is more decentralized in that sense, but with much less features. Please leave your thoughts on this topic in the comments section below.

I’m Ashton Addison, CEO/Founder of the EventChain Smart Ticketing platform. See EventChain.io for our whitepaper and to join the community movement.

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MAS and Deloitte publication. http://www.mas.gov.sg/~/media/ProjectUbin/Project%20Ubin%20%20SGD%20on%20Distributed%20Ledger.pdf