Lawmakers join growing push to create a 'digital dollar'
Lawmakers have introduced a bill that would allow the US Treasury to create a digital dollar.
The electronic dollar, a virtual representation of a US dollar, would allow people to make payments using tokens on mobile phones or through cards versus cash.
ECASH (electronic cash), as the bill calls it, would be a bearer instrument that wouldn’t require payment processing intermediaries, such as SWIFT, the world’s largest payment messaging network. That means payments using ECASH would be near instantaneous — even across national borders — and processing fees would likely be dramatically reduced.