The president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas will vacate his post after six years on the job, and this announcement is being widely discussed around cryptocurrency trading circles. Ron Kaplan was one of the strongest advocates for the United States Treasury and the Fed to adopt a policy conducive to minting a digital version of the dollar. A major factor in his recommendation was the potential advantage it would hold to eliminate the threat of counterfeiting. After six years, it seems the idea of a digital dollar has become more popular than a “hard” dollar.

It should be noted that the Fed would favor a pilot project to develop sovereign blockchains that are only based on original networks to a certain extent. Unlike the digital versions of the ruble in Russia and the dollar in Singapore, which are both largely based on the Ethereum network, the digital greenback blockchain would be unique and highly secretive in some respects. It is not clear whether a digital dollar would offer a public ledger of transactions.

Even though Kaplan was one of the strongest advocates of the digital dollar, he was more interested in seeing internal adoption at the Fed and Treasury levels at this time. In other words, he did not think it was a good idea to try to push circulation right off the bat, which is what the People's Bank of China is attempting to do now with the digital yuan. Needless to say, Kaplan was rightfully concerned about China's push of the digital yuan across Asia, and this concerns are valid insofar as the strategy of widespread adoption being launched in an attempt to weaken the U.S. dollar.

Kaplan did not always favor the idea of replacing the dollar with the U.S. dollar with some type of digital asset and currency, preferring a gradual process to eliminate the use of the dollar. He noted that the dollar had the benefit of being a de facto reserve currency, which would give it the ability to back up the dollar with physical currency as it did when the dollar was backed by gold. As for Bitcoin traders, they see Kaplan's retirement as a sign of temporary relief because their favorite token continues to be the most valuable.