A technical assistance report published by the International Monetary Fund reveals that the IMF has urged the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the central bank of the Philippines, to collect and study data from cryptocurrency exchanges. The report identifies the island country, with a population of 105 million, as a potentially important crypto market and suggests that the BSP should focus on cross-border flows using cryptocurrencies.
According to the report,
“At BSP request, the mission also delivered a lecture on the treatment of crypto-assets in macroeconomic statistics, based on the latest methodology released by STA. The Philippines may become an important market for crypto-assets, as the BSP recently authorized operations for three more virtual currency exchanges (VCE), bringing the total number of approved VCE to 10.
The mission encourages the BSP to start exploring the possibility of collecting data on these exchanges for macroeconomic analysis, in particular international financial flows using crypto-assets. The mission suggests requesting aggregated data, on a quarterly basis, on gross transactions, indicating the country of origin and destination of the funds transacted. In addition, it would be useful to breakdown the parties involved in the transactions between individuals, financial corporations, and nonfinancial corporations.”
The IMF mission is providing training to the BSP on how to analyze crypto-assets in macroeconomic statistics.
While the IMF has identified the Philippines as an emerging market in the crypto space, the Philippine peso currently ranks 44th by volume as the most traded national currency for Bitcoin, according to data compiled by CoinHills.com.
The IMF report was published in December following recommendations made in July of 2019 by an IMF staff team that provides technical assistance to the BSP.
You can check out the full report here.
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