Bitt Launches Digital Barbadian Dollar on Bitcoin’s Blockchain

Bitt Inc., a digital currency exchange based in Barbados, has announced the launch of a blockchain-based version of the Barbadian dollar.

The new digital currency essentially acts as a digital equivalent of the official government-backed Barbadian fiat currency. The exchange rate is fixed to 1:1 between the two instruments, “One of our digital Barbados dollars is equivalent to one dollar issued by the Central Bank of Barbados. What we do is allow people to do more with their money,” said Gabriel Abed, CEO and co-founder of Bitt.

The Bitt team held a cocktail reception at the Buzo Osteria Italiana, a restaurant in Barbados, where the launch was officially announced on Monday. The event was also covered by the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation.

Bitt’s digital dollar is built on top of the bitcoin blockchain, where assets are programmed and attached to small amounts of bitcoin for tracking and verification purposes. Users can download Bitt’s mobile app, which gives them the ability to send these digital dollars to anyone with a few taps on the screen.

At the launch event, Abed said that every citizen in Barbados deserves the right to be able to send a dollar domestically with 0 fees.

In an interview with CoinDesk, Abed mentioned that the mobile platform was the second step in the company’s strategy to bring a blockchain-based payment system to the Caribbean.

“Our goal as an organization is to build an ecosystem. We launched our exchange nine months ago. Now, we’ve launched our second phase, the digital fiat dollar. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the dollar in Barbados digitized as an IOU that can be sent and received.”

According to a report by NationNews, a Barbados news outlet, Bitt has received the “blessing” of the the Barbados Financial Services Commission and the Barbados Central Bank, to launch their digital dollar.

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