*By Adriana Saluceste
“Exclusive digital currency for use in the Tokyo Olympics”; “Brazil wants to launch Real Digital”; “Bitcoin reaches record value in the year”. Headlines like these appear on Brazilian news pages every day. It seems that there is no more discussion after all: digital currencies really are here to stay. But what is the future of these crypto assets and how are we going to relate to them over the next few years?
When the first examples of digital currency appeared in the world, back in 2008, Orkut was still one of the main social networks used in Brazil, WhatsApp had not been created, chatting via SMS was a constant in the lives of those who wanted to communicate faster and without having to make a phone call. Practicalities such as electronic payments, then, were not even a dream for most human beings. What, then, would a digital currency be used for? Time seems to have answered this and other questions.
Over the years, more and more people started to venture into the world of investments, including those made in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, the initial example of this type of asset, had its ups and downs. It went from resounding appreciation to disbelief and, now, it seems to have reached a solid level in terms of supply and demand in the market, which makes it increasingly attractive for those looking for ways to diversify investments.
In the wake of this success, many other coins were launched. Some found their niche among investors, others were discontinued. During the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, an official digital currency was announced by the Japanese government to centralize operations carried out by delegations and visitors to the games. Now, the Brazilian Central Bank has even released the source code used to create the necessary infrastructure for the testing phase of Real Digital.
A harmonious coexistence between this type of currency and traditional currencies, backed by the appreciation of gold, for example, seems to be the most likely scenario for the near future. Even because one of the arguments against cryptocurrencies is precisely that they have no ballast. However, nowadays most of the money circulating through banking networks around the world does not have it either.
One of the most recent examples of this is Greece, which, when faced with a financial crisis, had to limit the number of withdrawals per person so that the banking system would not enter into irreversible bankruptcy. That is, the money that the population had in banks was almost purely virtual, there was no real currency behind it. However, the crisis was able to be mastered after some time and, nowadays, the Greeks are no longer the center of attention when talking about economic and financial problems.
Likewise, as the new currency modalities prove capable of overcoming the typical bumps in the financial market, the tendency is for people to also gain confidence in negotiations that involve them and, consequently, to start using them more frequently, which which is the basis for any asset to consolidate. The future of digital currencies, in this sense, seems to be that of every currency – and of every financial asset, in fact: mass use, currency ups and downs, small “scares” over the years. Nothing we don't already know.
*Adriana Saluceste is director of Technology and Operations at Tecnobank.
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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