In a recent speech at the Singapore Fintech Festival on December 9th 2020, Vitalik Buterin, the co founder of Ethereum talked about how Central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, will be fairly easy to convert into cryptocurrencies in the future. As Buterin stated, “There’s a question of how these central bank [digital] currencies are going to interact with both crypto and digital currencies more generally. There’s going to be more digital assets of many different kinds coming over the next few decades. I expect that there will be a lot of opportunities to fairly exchange between different kinds of assets and move from one ecosystem to another.”
Buterin also expressed optimism over global CBDC development, noting that central bank digital money has a lot of potential benefits, such as simplifying macroeconomics. However, the concept of a CBDC comes with a lot of associated concerns such as privacy issues, Buterin noted.
The Ethereum co-founder was confident that blockchain will bring even more similar use cases in the future, especially powered with increasing scalability. “In the case of vaccines for COVID-19 specifically, the main challenge is that it takes time to build these things, and people want to get these vaccines fairly quickly so the world can get back to normal,” he added.
