The public bank was tasked with estimating the value of the 500 or so different coins that were around and exchanging them with its own currency, the rijksdaalder. By having a single currency, the highly chaotic system was improved, and the bank quickly became a hub for settling international payments.2  The modern banknote In Sweden, problems with the coin system were of a different kind. At that time, Swedish coins were made of copper, not gold or silver. As a consequence, they had to be quite sizeable, as their value still depended on the metal used. Obviously, this made daily purchases a fairly heavy exercise. But again, great ideas seemed to come to our rescue when Latvian-born Dutchman Johan Palmstruch, with the blessing of Charles X Gustav, set up Stockholms Banco to issue the first ‘modern’ European banknotes. This was in 1661. However, Mr Palmstruch hadn’t thought it through properly. Or at least, he had underestimated the collateral needed to operate a business like that. When people started to queue up outside the bank to have their notes redeemed, he quickly ran out of metal. The bank was liquidated in 1667, and poor Mr Palmstruch was imprisoned, though reprieved from his initial death sentence. The year  2 See, for example, Gerarda Westerhuis , and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘’Four Hundred Years of Central Banking in  the Netherlands, 1609–2016’’, in Sveriges Riksbank and the History of Central Banking (2018): 242–264, for more about Amsterdamsche Wisselbank.
Five years later, many of the world’s central banks are now working on issuing digital central bank money to the public in the form of so-called Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). At the Riksbank, we have now taken a further step in our investigation by turning to the technical aspects of an e-krona. In practice, in 2020 we started a project, the e-krona pilot, to learn more about how a technical solution for the e-krona could work.9 Besides, the Riksbank is involved in extensive international work on the subject and participates in, and leads, a number of international working groups.10  9 See https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona/ for more about the e-krona project. 10 See for instance the recently published reports by a group of seven central banks (besides the Riksbank, Bank  of Canada, Bank of England, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank, Federal Reserve and Swiss National Bank) and the Bank for International Settlements on various aspects of CBDCs that can be found at: https://www.bis.org/publ/othp42.htm  13 [15]  Why an e-krona? For hundreds of years, the Riksbank has ensured that the Swedish public has access to a means of payment issued by the state. The public’s access to central bank money is the anchor of a unified national currency that includes both private and government money, and where the exchange rate between government and private entities becomes one-to-one. Learning from history, I think we must ensure that this uniformity of money continues.