Is The IMF Creating A New Cryptocurrency?

By Rishma Banerjee

As per recently published reports, the International Money Fund (IMF) is collaborating with the World Bank to create a new cryptocurrency, Learning Coin. This, however, is quite ironic as IMF’s chairwoman, Christine Lagarde has been known to not take Bitcoin (BTC) and other digital assets as a whole seriously. Given Lagarde’s recent comments as well as her interview with NBC where she stated that “anything that is using distributed ledger technology,” primarily crypto assets and their derivatives, are “clearly shaking the system”, this initiative just seems a little odd. Confusingly so, she says that she is excited about Bitcoin’s use case. But, she worries that it could “shake the system so much that we could lose stability”.

Regardless, her project which is called Learning Coin will be launched soon, with the aim of ensuring that people learn more about blockchain and its use case.

The plan is for this asset to stay in the hands of these two companies. In fact, the Learning Coin is barely a crypto asset at all. It’s really just a way for the teams to educate themselves on smart contracts, use case, and the blockchain technology as a whole.

Essentially, the two groups are incentivizing their employees with the Learning Coin by rewarding the ones who educate themselves. Provisions will be there for workers to earn rewards for achieving certain goals.

As many are assuming, the chairwoman might have put her support behind this digital asset in order to learn more about cryptocurrencies despite her apparent view on them all. Other than that it may also be a way for the IMF and World Bank to view how companies can handle digital assets as a whole. It’s also possible that they’re working on a closed cryptocurrency simply to see how they work within a business ecosystem. Lagarde commented on this as well, saying that financial companies “will have to be held accountable so that they can be fully trusted”.