National Bank of Cambodia

Rather than beginning with an aggressive campaign to eliminate dollars from circulation, the country has been building payment infrastructure intended to make transactions in riel easier.

Its most significant initiative is Bakong, a nationally developed digital payment system.

That creates a question few countries faced during the original waves of dollarization.

What happens when a country attempts to rebuild confidence in its currency, not primarily through banknotes, but through the technology people use to move money? 6.

Can technology bring back the real? In October 2020, Cambodia launched a payment system that offered a remarkably modern answer to a very old economic problem.

The system was called Bakong.

And unlike the foreign currency that had dominated Cambodia's financial system for decades, Pekong was developed under the leadership of Cambodia's own central bank.

But the interesting part was not simply that Cambodia had introduced a new way to pay.