The recent coronavirus pandemic has made countries to recognize how they can leverage on adopting a national digital currency. Central banks started to quarantine bank notes after the WHO has identified banknotes as a medium through which the virus can be transmitted from one person to another. The WHO further recommended the use of digital currencies for daily transactions.

In view of this, a Japanese legislator, Kozo Yamamoto said in a recent interview that the Japanese government should adopt a central bank digital currency (CBDC) faster. Yamamoto happens to be a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) member of the house of representatives and a former official at the Ministry of Finance.

Yamamoto thinks large corporations should be able to issue digital currencies and control them as medium of exchange and a store of value. However, he claims the “unit of account” must be controlled by the government, else average people will forget about the traditional fiat currency.

According to Yamamoto, the government must protect the role of the unit of account no matter what. He said if Japan fails to issue a digital currency and people in the world use other digital currencies, the Japanese yen will be forgotten, and its sovereignty will be lost.

According to him, a digital yen would serve as a bridge currency between other digital currencies. The Japanese legislator argued that a CBDC can address potential issues that may arise if large companies such as Facebook and Amazon, among others issue their own tokens that are not usable outside their territories.

In a previous interview with Reuters, Yamamoto said Japan should create its own digital currency within the next 2 to 3 years. But in his recent interview, he is claiming that the right time for the issuance of the CBDC should be as quickly as possible.

According to Yamamoto, a CBDC which is not based on a blockchain is “meaningless”. He said the blockchain can track stolen money using KYC checks for transactions above a certain amount of money.