The anticipated benefits of CBDC for Jamaican citizens, businesses and the Government include increased financial inclusion, as it will provide another, easier-to-access means of efficient and secured payments. For deposit-taking institutions and BOJ itself, CBDC presents an opportunity to improve cash management processes and costs. A total of J$230 million dollars in CBDC will be issued to deposit-taking institutions and authorized payment service providers during the CBDC pilot exercise which ends in December. Jamaica’s Jam-Dex was also recently launched and is now available via a digital wallet offered by one of the local banks,” PwC said in a statement to editors.
However, the Jamaican government is determined to make the Jamaica CBDC the next generation in the country’s currency. So far, the Bank of Jamaica has minted $250 million Jamaica dollars which equates to about $1.5 million U.S dollars. The island nation has set a goal of replacing 5% of its paper money with digital currency.
NFTs are a new and innovative part of the crypto ecosystem that have the potential to change and update many business models for the Web 3 world. Since it is open source, it is possible for other people to use the majority of the code, make a few changes and then launch their own separate currency. Some of these coins are very similar to Bitcoin, with just one or two amended features (such as Litecoin), while others are very different, with varying models of security, issuance and governance. However, they all share the same moniker — every coin issued after Bitcoin is considered to be an altcoin.
With a full rollout expected in the spring of 2022, the Bank of Jamaica will push for widespread adoption of the Jamaica CBDC. The plan for the rollout includes partnerships with major banks and retailers as well as a national marketing campaign. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the G7 sanctions response, cross-border wholesale CBDC projects have more than doubled. There are currently 13 of them—including Project mBridge—which connects banks in China, Thailand, the UAE, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia. The report placed countries in one of two categories – retail or wholesale – based on their CBDC projects. The dollar remains the undisputed king of global finance – for now.
Three countries have fully launched a CBDC—the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria. In Nigeria and the Bahamas, CBDC issuance has increased substantially. All three countries are focused on expanding the reach of their retail CBDCs domestically. Every G20 country is exploring a CBDC, with 19 of them in the advanced stages of CBDC exploration.
They represent the digital form of a country’s official currency and are a direct liability of the Central bank. As such CBDCs potentially represent a radical departure from “private money alternative” of the Cryptocurrency world to date. CBDC is a digital form of central bank issued currency and is therefore legal tender. It is not to be confused with cryptocurrency, which is privately issued and not backed by a central authority. The race for the future of money is on, so here are the key items to catch you up on what a central bank digital currency is—and what it isn’t. Price volatility has long been one of the features of the cryptocurrency market.
There is a new high of 44 ongoing CBDC pilots, including the digital euro. European countries—both in the euro area and beyond—are increasingly testing wholesale CBDCs, both domestically and across borders. 134 countries & currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC.
Maybe the lesson out of that is that fees are important for the institutions to be motivated and that the convenience of it, however, even with a fee, is such that the population gravitates to it. A lot of those countries are very successful in it, and I think that we should adopt those lessons here. We don’t want it to be onerous, but I would want to say that we are prepared to sit and discuss that, and I think the banks need to be open-minded too,” Byles said.
The BOJ still has to convince Jamaicans on Jam-Dex’s usefulness when compared with physical cash and cards for transactions. There is no cost to you when using your phone for CBDC transactions. Depending on the specifics of our situations, some other countries and territories may anticipate slightly different benefits from using CBDC, but several benefits are universal, and apply to us. In June 2024, total transaction volume reached 7 trillion e-CNY ($986 billion) in 17 provincial regions across sectors such as education, healthcare, and tourism. This figure is nearly four times the 1.8 trillion yuan ($253 billion) recorded by the People’s Bank of China in June 2023.
“CBDCs are measured via a synthetic index capturing the central banks’ progress and stance on CBDC development, in both the retail and wholesale context,” it noted. When you CBDC you are spending receiving and transferring the funds available in your digital wallet. Online banking allows you to spend, receive and transfer the funds available in your bank account. The issuance and distribution of the CBDC will be fully integrated with the Bank’s financial market infrastructure, the JamClear® Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS). The approach will not compete with deposits in deposit taking institutions, but rather it will leverage the existing financial and telecommunications infrastructures of the country.
