A NEW ERA OF DIGITAL MONEY

  In October 2020, The Bahamas leapfrogged into the digital vanguard with the launch of the world’s first central bank digital currency—the sand dollar. Pegged one-to-one to the Bahamian dollar and using a blockchain-backed digital token, the new currency is available to people and businesses to buy and sell goods and services and send money to each other. Sand dollars are issued and regulated by The Bahamas’ central bank. The Bahamas territory is spread out over 700 islands—making it unprofitable for commercial banks to have ATMs or physical branches on remote, sparsely populated islands. Extreme weather events make the cost of maintaining infrastructure even steeper. As a result, the most vulnerable often lack access to financial services. The need to serve the unbanked and under-banked population, along with a drive to modernize the payment system, spurred the central bank’s introduction of the new digital currency. “We didn’t start with the idea of a central bank digital curren...