Ghana considers digital currency, e-cedi

THE Ghanaian government is moving towards the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) experiment.

The Bank of Ghana (BoG) made this known through an announcement by the governor of the Central bank, Ernest Addison, who was speaking during a news conference in Ghana’s capital, Accra.

It was announced at the press conference that the BoG was in the advanced stages of creating a CBDC.

The Governor also said that the planned “e-cedi” will pass through developmental and evaluation phases before a decision will be made on a national rollout. According to the BoG Governor, the final stage will involve a pilot study to finalize issues concerning feasibility before the CBDC goes into national circulation.

Addison said that the design phase is already nearing completion and the team is on standby to begin phase two. The pilot study will reportedly involve a limited rollout of the planned e-cedi for mobile payments.

“From that pilot, we will be able to determine whether this is feasible and what sort of things need to be tweaked to make it work effectively,” he stated.

The possibility of creating a CBDC has been under experiment by the BoG since late 2019.

The BoG had, in June 2020, confirmed that it was ready to pilot an experimental e-cedi project. The country is looking to pioneer CBDC development in Africa.

Governor Addison had stated that “the Bank of Ghana was one of the first African Central Banks to declare that we were working on a digital currency looking at the concept of an e-cedi.”

He warned investors to be wary of the volatility of virtual currencies when giving comments on Bitcoin (BTC) and altcoins, adding that the unstable nature of cryptocurrency prices makes them unsuitable as a unit of account and medium of exchange.

The governor further stressed the importance of central bank-issued digital money which he concluded as being a better form of digital currency than cryptocurrency.