A member of parliament for the Scottish National Party (SNP) has urged his party to consider experimenting with a national digital currency.
Speaking at the SNP conference held in Aberdeen – in northeastern Scotland – George Kerevan said he wanted the country to trial the ScotPound, a native digital currency that would co-exist alongside the pound sterling.
The digital currency, Kerevan told BuzzFeed News, would be an important ready-made alternative to the pound when the next independence debate surfaced, and one that could “bubble up” through the party.
Kerevan’s comments follow the publication of a report last month by The New Economics Foundation which first suggested the ‘ScotPound’.
As previously reported by CoinDesk, the report proposed that each Scottish citizen should be given a 250 ScotPound dividend and that payments should be made via text message or a mobile app.
Scotland’s fight for independence, primarily led by the SNP, resulted in a national referendum in September last year, which saw the majority of participants (55.3%) vote against independence.
The SNP recorded a historic landslide in the Scottish general election held earlier this year, gaining 56 out of 59 seats.