The Sovereign Official Digital Association (SODA) advises central banks and official institutions on all aspects of digital money and, in collaboration with technology providers, assists them in the delivery of ‘test and deploy’ experiments in a live field environment.
We believe that the need for public digital money is growing. Physical cash is one of the best inventions in the history of humankind and has served the economic needs of most societies very well for many years. Easy to understand and free to use, privately held and with no intermediary, cash was one of the tools that most aided human development and economic advancement.
However, in the 2020s cash is becoming less effective. You can’t pay your bills with cash, and for the many goods and services you can only buy on the internet, we all need to use commercial bank money or a form of e-money, which is not privacy preserving or free to use for both parties. This decline in cash starts to erode our civil liberties, and puts the power into the hands of payment providers, further marginalising the least well off in society.
Today, SODA’s vision is for a new form of public digital money – which can be used privately, free of charge, and without intermediaries – in a digital habitat. The emergence of innovations in distributed ledger technology, blockchain and tokenisation offer an opportunity for digital money to serve society’s needs in the 21st century.
