by Stavroula Pabst, Unlimited Hangout:
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Idris Elba stars in a promotional video for Stellar’s “Real World” campaign, where he touts Stellar’s more “equitable” vision of finance, a future where opportunities are “borderless.”
“If ideas are borderless, opportunities should be too,” A-list actor Idris Elba recently exclaimed in a video for cryptocurrency player Stellar’s “Real World” campaign.
In the elaborate promotional video featuring Elba, traditional currencies are portrayed as unreliable and especially detrimental to marginalized people. An immigrant, working class-coded woman in the video asks, “I can send money to my family, but how much will arrive?” Meanwhile, an older man counting his paper monies in the video says “[t]he more I save, the more I feel unsafe.”
Presenting itself as the solution to such problems, the Stellar network promises to make opportunities “borderless,” helping the video’s characters to save and send money to others without the traditional financial system’s various obstacles.
Indeed, Stellar’s “Real World” campaign portrays the Stellar protocol as an agent for dignified opportunities, making the financial system work for all. And, generally, many cryptocurrency and bitcoin enthusiasts put stock in such networks because they see them as a medium that ensures financial freedom. But Stellar, like other altruistic-branded financial organizations in the crypto space, is getting involved in other projects that suggest “financial inclusion,” as most would understand it, isn’t their biggest priority. A prime example is Stellar’s intense interest in facilitating the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which are a programmable, central bank-issued digital version of a country’s fiat currency.
While CBDC proponents tout them as fast, convenient, and ideal for cheaper international transactions, Unlimited Hangout has previously elaborated on CBDCs’ propensity to undermine anonymity, foster surveillance and even, in terms of programmability, be used to enforce policies or otherwise be weaponized to manipulate or control peoples’ financial activities and behavior. If rolled out on a wider scale and introduced in tandem with other tools, like Digital IDs, UH contributor Iain Davis and UH contributing editor Whitney Webb (among others) have posited that CBDCs could “be used to monitor our whereabouts, limit our freedom of movement and control our access to money, goods and services.”
With nation states fearing that falling behind in digital currencies could compromise their competitiveness or sovereignty, the CBDC race feeds itself, thus bypassing critical public discussions around CBDCs’ potential societal harms. As per the Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker, 130 countries representing 98 percent of the world’s GDP are now exploring a CBDC. Juniper Research recently estimated that the global value of CBDCs will jump from around $100 million today to $213 billion by 2030.
Naturally, as interest in CBDCs proliferates, so have CBDC pilots involving both the public and private sectors. In the process, a myriad of elite-gilded and blockchain-powered digital payment networks and organizations, including Stellar, Ethereum, Ripple and/or the people and forces behind them, are vying for their technologies and payment systems to be incorporated into the developing digital currency infrastructures of tomorrow.
As we shall see, these organizations’ collective facade of inclusivity and altruism obfuscates their true nature as elite-backed or otherwise compromised groups helping centralize, digitize, and even possibly program or otherwise weaponize money in ways unaccountable to traditional policymaking processes and the public, thus bringing them immense power while helping facilitate what could functionally amount to a financial digital control grid.
The CBDC Pilot Race
As the CBDC race heats up, major players in the crypto world are playing key roles in ongoing CBDC pilot projects globally. While many crypto players are interested in facilitating CBDCs, I will focus on Ripple, Stellar, and Ethereum, all of which are blockchain-based platforms being utilized in multiple CBDC pilots, for the purposes of this article.
Blockchain, a distributed digital ledger technology system, is known for its ability to securely store information and transaction records. Key to the functioning of cryptocurrencies, blockchain is often described as a cornerstone for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an ongoing and controversial technological revolution popularized by elite-gilded groups like the World Economic Forum, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young, that seeks to blur the boundaries of the physical, digital, and biological spheres.
Originally founded in 2012 as OpenCoin, Ripple is a blockchain-based digital payment network and transaction protocol that facilitates the cryptocurrency XRP, one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrencies. According to its X/Twitter profile, Ripple’s mission is to “build breakthrough crypto solutions for a world without economic borders.”
Developing a CBDC platform for central banks to use, Ripple is “in talks” with over a dozen governments for the purposes of CBDC development. Namely, Ripple is or has participated in CBDC pilots for Montenegro, Palau, Bhutan, and Colombia. It was also tapped to facilitate the National Bank of Georgia’s CBDC pilot. Ripple website visitors will additionally find extensive efforts to promote the protocol’s CBDC capacities, which emphasize the platform’s “stability, security and resilience,” accessible and sustainable nature, and potential for interoperability.
A 2014 Ripple spinoff and rival, Stellar is a public open-source decentralized blockchain network run by the non-profit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), which operates Lumens (XLM), Stellar’s cryptocurrency. “Built with CBDCs in mind,” Stellar has created a guidebook for policymakers about CBDCs, as well as a whitepaper that explains how Stellar in particular is up to the task of CBDC facilitation. As I had noted in a previous UH report, “SDF’s mission is to strive towards ‘global financial inclusion,’ a buzzword elite groups like the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund have used to garner support for and participation in the CBDC paradigm.”
As I noted in previous UH reporting, Stellar has participated in CBDC pilots in Ukraine and Australia, and is developing a Brazilian CBDC in collaboration with Mercado Bitcoin. The German bank Bankhaus von der Heydt, meanwhile, selected Stellar to help develop a prospective European stablecoin.
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