Mishi Choudhary, the legal director of the Software Freedom Law Center, supported the efforts of some United States lawmakers to develop an electronic version of the U.S. dollar.

In written testimony for a Thursday hearing of the House Financial Services Committee on digital wallets, Choudhary said the United States needed “a currency or electronic token that is equivalent in functionality to cash, offers all of its benefits including anonymity, privacy, autonomy, no transaction fee and addresses all of its flaws.” Her description suggested a token with many of the benefits of a central bank digital currency and cryptocurrencies but without traceability — similar to the e-cash proposed by Representative Stephen Lynch in a March bill.

“The unique element of the ECASH idea is hardware wallets containing the equivalent of coins created by and managed by the United States Treasury, which is as close a way of universal access just like the cash,” said Choudhary. “This idea imagines how everybody can have, store and pay with money without the banking system being involved in any way at all. An idea is to have electronic tokens that are equivalent in functionality to cash and no more traceable.”

Choudhary added that the aim of this proposed e-cash would be to preserve privacy and improve financial inclusion while allowing the public access to the software underlying the technology for transparency. Raúl Carrillo, deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project and one of the witnesses at the hearing, said that unlike cryptocurrency, e-cash would not be used for payments online, and could potentially be lost along with missing hardware.

The proposed e-cash would not be built on a blockchain or require the internet to