by Stavroula Pabst at Unlimited Hangout
“If ideas are borderless, opportunities should be too,” A-list actor Idris Elba recently exclaimed in a video for cryptocurrency player Stellar’s “Real World” campaign.
In the elaborate promotional video featuring Elba, traditional currencies are portrayed as unreliable and especially detrimental to marginalized people. An immigrant, working class-coded woman in the video asks, “I can send money to my family, but how much will arrive?” Meanwhile, an older man counting his paper monies in the video says “[t]he more I save, the more I feel unsafe.”
Presenting itself as the solution to such problems, the Stellar network promises to make opportunities “borderless,” helping the video’s characters to save and send money to others without the traditional financial system’s various obstacles.
Indeed, Stellar’s “Real World” campaign portrays the Stellar protocol as an agent for dignified opportunities, making the financial system work for all. And, generally, many cryptocurrency and bitcoin enthusiasts put stock in such networks because they see them as a medium that ensures financial freedom. But Stellar, like other altruistic-branded financial organizations in the crypto space, is getting involved in other projects that suggest “financial inclusion,” as most would understand it, isn’t their biggest priority. A prime example is Stellar’s intense interest in facilitating the rise of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which are a programmable, central bank-issued digital version of a country’s fiat currency.
While CBDC proponents tout them as fast, convenient,…
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