EDITOR’S NOTE: #IslandsCaribbean featured Digital Nomads in our last edition. And, we will start a series featuring investment in the Caribbean hospitality sector in the next. Both involve necessary financial transactions to support oneself in the former, and one’s investment in the latter. So, this newsletter features use of cryptocurrency in the Caribbean.
Our headline, taken from Euronews, reads: “The World’s First Fully Bitcoin-Enabled Community Is Being Built On This Small Caribbean island”. Bequia — the second-largest island of the Grenadines archipelago — will begin accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment for daily essentials, entertainment, and even luxury villas currently under construction.
Otherwise, the Eastern Caribbean Bank now has its own digital currency — DCash — which it claims ” is the first such blockchain-based currency introduced by any of the world’s currency unions”. And, the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar has attained the highest ranking of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) in PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC’s) Global CBDC Index 2021.
Also, investment banking company RF Holdings has partnered with Barbados-based fintech company Bitt to develop a platform to accept and access digital currencies — such as Barbados’ mMoney, the Bahamas Sand Dollar, and Eastern Caribbean’s DCash — across the bank’s financial products. Finally, the Bank of Jamaica is also to pilot its own CBDC.