Tunisia pumps fiat on blockchain - a first

Tunisia, a country with 10 million citizens, already has a form of electronic fiat currency known as the eDinar in use through the Tunisian Post, dcebrief.com reports. 90% of the adults in Tunisia with a bank account have one through the Tunisian Post while over 3 million Tunisian adults have no banking relationship.

The nations leaders in government and industry want to improve this via a partnership with Monetas, a global transactions platform, which aims to bring all of the objectives together through the blockchain’s technology. There are over 600 thousand people who will be transitioned to the new system through Tunisian Post shortly, in association with the national government and La Poste Tunisian (LPT).

Monetas has just partnered with Microsoft in launching a new cloud-based blockchain platform for large financial institutions to use for experimentation with the new technology. Monetas claims to offer notary public-like protection for this new platform’s transactions, and describes a Bitcoin-like system, save for the mining aspect since the currency is not created internally. Gevers goes on to explain what Tunisian’s can expect from the Monetas system in 2016.

Monetas CEO Johann Gevers, has claimed that: “The Monetas deployment in Tunisia is the first application for a full ecosystem of digital payments. With the La Poste Tunisienne Android application powered by Monetas, Tunisians can use their smartphones to make instant mobile money transfers, pay for goods and services online and in person, send remittance, pay salaries and bills, and manage official government identification documents.”, the source cites.

It does not seem that Bitcoin has a future within this national system, and in many nations, Bitcoin is neither legal nor illegal. Not being a currency approved or sanctioned by the nation’s central bank or national government does not bode well, at least through Monetas. Gevers says he is working on bringing a similar system to “12 markets”, which may or may not be full nation-states, in 2016, affecting up to 300 million people.