This post was most recently updated on February 27th, 2019
“The words “Bitcoin to the moon” appeared on the tram in the city of Vinnitsa, Ukraine. These photos are going crazy on social media. Interestingly, just as the photos appeared, the Ukrainian central bank’s digital currency pilot project e-hryvnia was announced.
It is not clear who the slogan on the tram is. Photographs circulating on Facebook show that the slogan appeared on the new Vin Way tram.
The 32-meter-long tram is built by Vinnitsa Transport and is a new type of tram with WiFi capabilities.
The photo was taken on February 24th, local time, and was sent online by stocks trader Roman Petrov of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).
However, in Ukraine, we also saw some negative news about Bitcoin. Just a week ago, the municipal government of the Ukrainian capital dismantled the local Bitcoin embassy.
The embassy, established in 2014, aims to popularize education, and Kuna, a large cryptocurrency exchange in Ukraine, is also involved in the project.
The operation team of the Bitcoin Embassy believes that it is illegal for the Kyiv City Government to take this action without a court order, infringing on its property rights.
Ukrainian central bank digital currency experiment
At the same time, the Ukrainian digital currency sector has witnessed another new development. The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) completed the pilot project for the electronic version of the country’s legal currency, the hryvnia . The news was announced by Alexander Yablunivskiy, head of the Ukrainian central bank’s payment system and innovation department. Yablunivskiy revealed that at the end of last year, they sent this new financial tool to NBU employees to assess their actual application and the bank’s ability to complete the project while hoping to get feedback from real users.
“The pilot is now complete. We have prepared an analytical paper that will be reviewed at a meeting of the National Bank’s board,”
The NBU will also publish a report containing the actual analysis of the project and the central bank’s digital currency trends. Yablunivskiy also mentioned that central currency (CBDC) such as e-hryvnia is often confused with the concept of cryptocurrency.
“We are not talking about cryptocurrency, we are talking about the digital currency of the central bank. It can be based on either centralized or decentralized ledger,”