Only recently, Estonia made headlines with the alleged announcement of releasing their national cryptocurrency ‘Estcoin’.
However, the news that spread like wildfire turned out to be a huge misunderstanding. As Business Insider Nordic reports, ‘Estcoin’ proved to be fake.
Estonia has been pioneering the cryptocurrency and blockchain worldwide for the last few months. As a country that enables e-voting and has recently introduced e-residency, nobody was surprised or shocked that Estonia has decided to launch their cryptocurrency.
The assumption was based on the notion that Estonia is aspiring to become a cutting-edge digital nation. Hence, investors would put their money into ‘Estcoin’ as an ICO and support it with achieving the goal.
Not only the biggest news providers have covered the story, but there were also multiple reports that Vitalik Butherin, the founder of Ethereum, served as an advisor to the ‘Estcoin’ project.
But as it turned out, it was a personal speculative idea rather than an official government initiative.
Kaspar Korjus, a significant Estonian entrepreneur who manages Estonia’s e-residency program, came up with the notion himself, wanting to see how would resonate with the public.
As Financial Times reports:
“Korjus asked what would happen if the country were to become the first sovereign state to issue its cryptocurrency. The currency, he suggested, could be called “estcoin”. The post went viral, and soon enough many were misconstruing the idea as an official government proposal. Which it wasn’t.”
Not long after that, however, the comments have been dismissed by Björn Segendorff, an advisor at the unit for financial infrastructure at the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank:
”We have spoken to Estonia’s central bank about it, and they are saying it’s not true. The news has been created by some unfortunate circumstance. It’s a false rumour. That’s what [the Estonian central bank] is saying. I met them three weeks ago, and they told me that if you hear anything about estcoin, don’t believe it.”
So far, no official statement has been made by neither by the Central Bank nor by Korjus himself.
Did you believe in ‘Estcoin’? What are your thoughts on the misunderstanding and the fact that ‘Estcoin’ turned out to be fake? Let us know in the comments below!
