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“Where we’re going is not a road that has been travelled,” said Marc Brûlé, head of the MintChip project and chief financial officer of the Mint. “It has its challenges but there are lots of people who are encouraging us.”

Like many such technologies, the initiative has mostly been cloaked in secrecy — apart from an app building contest last year aimed at coming up with new ways of using the currency. Beyond that, the Mint has been determinedly tight-lipped about what it’s up to, which has only served to heighten expectations among the tight-knit community of techno-geeks and others that are focused on the sector.

Certainly, interest in so-called crypto-currencies is exploding for a variety of reasons, not least because of loss of faith in traditional money in the wake of recent central bank money-printing. Digital money such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and various online game currencies that have made the jump into the real world are starting to garner major attention, but there’s a big difference between them and what the Mint is doing. As a government organization, the Mint has the backing of the federal government, while Bitcoin and the like clearly do not.

Anyone following recent news events knows that this is creating enormous regulatory and legal challenges for their proponents. Here in Canada for instance, most of the banks have quietly stopped doing business with the handful of companies that allow customers to exchange Canadian currency for Bitcoins. Meanwhile, authorities in the U.S. recently seized two bank accounts belonging to Mt. Gox, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, on the grounds that it was operating an unlicensed money transfer business, effectively stymieing the Japan-based company’s efforts to expand into the U.S.