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Georgia is deepening its cooperation with cryptocurrency technology company Ripple to accelerate the transition to the digital economy. Officials of the National Bank of Georgia (NBG) met with Ripple representative James Wallis to increase cooperation in the fields of financial technology and digitalization.

Ripple is in talks with Georgia

NBG Acting Director Natia Turnava and Head of the Bank’s Financial and Supervisory Technology Development Department Varlam Ebanoidze attended the meeting. The Central Bank of Georgia officially announced the meeting with a post on its LinkedIn account on June 8. During the meeting, Ripple’s Deputy Head of Central Bank Affairs James Wallis introduced Georgian officials to Alistair Brown, a representative of Ripple’s business partner EPAM Systems.

“It was an honor to come back to Tbilisi and introduce our partner Alistair Brown from EPAM Systems to NBG Acting Director Natia Turnava,” Wallis said at the meeting. said. Headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA, EPAM is a company specializing in software engineering services, digital platform engineering and digital artifact design.

New collaboration is happening

According to the official statement of NBG, potential areas of cooperation for the digitalization of the Georgian economy were discussed at the meeting. This new collaboration builds on the previous partnership, in which NBG assumed the technological participation of Ripple for the pilot cryptocurrency project “digital lari”. As previously reported, NBG invited nine companies, including Ripple Labs, to join the digital lari project to advance CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) research in September 2023. Subsequently, the financial regulator selected Ripple Labs as its official technology partner to develop digital lari.

The Central Bank of Georgia is not the only global central bank collaborating with Ripple on CBDC development and related integrations. In addition to Georgia, Ripple Labs has also been involved in CBDC pilots in countries such as Colombia, Bhutan, Palau, Montenegro. Ripple Labs doubled down on its public support for global CBDC development with a 23-page white paper in late 2023. “CBDCs are needed to support the most positive effects of asset tokenization, an increasingly targeted system for converting tangible assets into cryptocurrencies stored on the blockchain,” the company said. He used the expressions.

While companies such as Ripple support CBDC development, some critics are concerned about potential CBDC disadvantages such as privacy problems and government surveillance. This news highlights the importance of cooperation with Ripple in Georgia’s transition to the digital economy and the increasing prevalence of CBDCs globally.