⚠️ HRF CBDC ⛓️🪙 alert from HRF for Philippines (14-FEB-2024)

🗝️ℹ️ (Key Information)

CBDC Status: Pilot

CBDC Launch: n/a

CBDC Model: n/a

CBDC Issued: n/a

Inflation Rate: 5.82%

One-Sentence Summary:

🇵🇭 Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) development carries forward amidst human rights and corruption concerns.

✅ In a move towards financial stability, the 🇵🇭 Central Bank, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, initiated a pilot CBDC in 2022 for use by financial institutions, set to likely issue a wholesale CBDC in 2026, as stated by Governor Eli Remolona Jr.

✅ While Governor Benjamin E. Diokno viewed CBDCs as a solution to payment efficiency issues in his 2022 speech, he believed they could not address financial exclusion's root causes and argued that existing digital payment methods were better options.

✅ In 2023, a new CBDC pilot, Project Agila, was launched to focus on improving payment efficiency and stability, supported by a group of financial institutions, with assistance from the International Monetary Fund and Bank for International Settlements.

✅ Governor Eli Remolona Jr. shared two updates in 2024, confirming that the central bank would not be using blockchain technology and would not explore a retail CBDC, focusing only on wholesale CBDC.

✅ A 2023 Freedom House report gave 🇵🇭 a 58 out of 100 points regarding freedom, raising concerns about how the implementation of a CBDC might exacerbate existing issues like government corruption and restrictions on free speech.

✅ Concerns arose that a CBDC could become a tool for government control, allowing for freezing and seizing activists, political rivals, and protestors' money, effectively undermining opposition.

✅ Deep-seated government corruption in 🇵🇭 raises doubts about assurances to limit CBDC-related surveillance, control, or risks, and worries about the potential use of CBDC policies to manipulate political favoritism.

#HumanRights #FinancialInclusion #CBDC #PhilippinesCentralBank #FreedomIndex #GovernmentCorruption

What does the development of a CBDC say about the state of freedom and human rights in the 🇵🇭? How could a CBDC give rise to potential misuse or corruption, and what measures can be taken to counteract this?

Disclaimer: This is an AI-generated summary of the original text from HRF, forigve fuck-ups plox. If you find it useful, ⚡ the Tracker Bot because the AI and Cloud bits are not free to run.

Source of data: https://cbdctracker.hrf.org/home (npub1zhqcda52mrvcc0vkwegwsp5xtpk6l6x5kqx85f06tu9lw5h6xx0scch0dw)

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