Bermuda is gearing up to digitize its entire economy on Base, citing lower transaction costs and more access to global finance as motivating factors.
Bermuda plans to turn itself into what it calls the “world’s first fully onchain national economy,” with backing from stablecoin giant Circle and crypto exchange Coinbase.
Under the plan, outlined in a Jan. 19 press release from the Government of Bermuda, Circle and Coinbase will provide “digital asset infrastructure and enterprise tools” to the government, as well as banks, insurers and local businesses, while also supporting education and technical onboarding.
“An onchain economy means using digital assets as an everyday financial infrastructure. For a country like Bermuda, a highly entrepreneurial economy with thousands of local businesses, traditional payment rails are expensive and restrictive,” the press release states.
As officials explain, Bermuda is often grouped with other Caribbean jurisdictions. This raises payment processing costs and limits access to global banking rails, pressures that “drive up fees and squeeze already-thin merchant margins,” the press release notes.
Circle’s USDC is outlined by the government as an alternative, saying there are now “multiple live examples in the Bermudian market, demonstrating how onchain digital payments allow individuals to transact locally.”
In a separate X post on Jan. 19, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong clarified that Bermuda’s digitization initiative will use Base, the Layer 2 network developed by the largest U.S. centralized exchange.
Both Coinbase and Circle have market capitalizations many times larger than Bermuda’s estimated 2025 GDP of about $8.4 billion. Circle’s market cap currently stands at $18.5 billion, while Coinbase’s is at $61.4 billion. Bermuda’s national currency, the Bermuda dollar, is pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar.
Bermuda was one of the earlier regions globally to clarify its regulatory stance on crypto. In 2018, the self-governed British Overseas Territory introduced the Digital Asset Business Act, one of the first comprehensive frameworks for the sector, under which both Circle and Coinbase were licensed and later expanded their operations.
