Sheila Warren is the project head of blockchain policy at the World Economic Forum. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.

For many people all over the world, paper cash and metal coins are already items of memory. Mobile payment providers, like Apply Pay and Samsung Pay, are being used at cash registers in countries like the United Kingdom and Japan, and people have responded well to the ease of this system and some of the benefits it provides.

But some countries, like the United States, are already falling behind in this race to adopt digital currency.

Mobile payments in the US hit $112 billion in 2016, while they were $5.5 trillion in China, according to iResearch . One of the main reasons is because China is a global leader in e-commerce. It is forecast to reach almost $2 trillion by 2022, according to Forrester , and the industry has developed rapidly through support from the government and rising business stars that are now giants: Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com.

As the technology developed and as support for e-commerce grew, many Chinese cities skipped right over credit card machines in favor of digital payments via WeChat and similar providers. The infrastructure, systems and processes to handle digital payments were relatively easy to adapt, and both industry and the government readily embraced the new digital reality. Because of this kind of support, the ecosystem was able to leapfrog over less advanced technologies and move directly to more advanced ones.

In environments like this where mobile payment is already de rigueur, there's little psychological barrier to the widespread adoption of digital currency. If people do not think of paper cash or checks as meaningful alternatives, let alone a default, they are likely to be more open to a digital currency and possibly even to cryptocurrency. They are already used to the speed and ease of digital payments, and because they have been using e-money in some form or another for years, the leap from payments via WeChat, for instance, to bitcoin would be smaller than the leap from cash straight to bitcoin.

Read More