As of today, January 23rd, the LBCOIN digital collector coin issued by the Bank of Lithuania is no longer available for purchase. The LBCOIN is the world's first central bank-issued collector coin based on blockchain technology.
"We are thrilled that this innovative project achieved all of its goals – attracted attention to Lithuania and brought the digitization processes in finance to public attention. It was a challenging project that involved creating NFTs (non-fungible tokens) before NFT became mainstream. Nevertheless, we believe the competencies and knowledge acquired during this project will be useful in both public and private sector initiatives and many other projects. We are proud to be part of the project that became a symbol of central bank innovations and is known in many countries," – says Vytautas Kašėta, one of the co-founders of the innovation laboratory "SUPER HOW?".
The world's first digital collector coin, LBCOIN, is dedicated to Lithuania's 1918 Act of Independence and its signatories. The LBCOIN coin consisted of 6 digital tokens that could be exchanged for one physical collector coin. Each digital token represents one of the twenty signatories of the Act of Independence of Lithuania, and the digital tokens are divided into 6 categories according to the signatories' fields of activity. Four thousand units were created for each category.
A special set of 6 tokens had to be collected to exchange them for a physical collector coin. There was also a possibility to transfer the digital tokens to a digital token wallet that operates on NEM public blockchain network.
"During the LBCOIN project, various digital currencies trials were made by central banks and many regulatory solutions have emerged that enable supervisory activities based on a public record. We participated in the implementation of the LBCOIN project and experiments of the digital euro, so we have no doubt that education and timely familiarization with new conceptual principles of digital finance are extremely important for the successful implementation of the digital euro in the eurozone. This is especially important in countries like Lithuania, and we believe that LBCOIN played exactly such a role. We hope this project will become the first, but not the last, example of central bank innovation from Lithuania," – says Andrius Bartminas, co-founder and CEO of "SUPER HOW?".
The LBCOIN digital collector coin was issued by the Bank of Lithuania 2.5 years ago. On January 23rd, 2023, after the electronic store becomes unavailable, all digital tokens stored in it will be destroyed.
More information about this project can be found on the websites lb.lt and lbcoin.lb.lt