Publications

With the aim of advancing the regulation and orderly development of the use of cryptoassets, President Biden has asked various federal agencies to study those markets in order to ensure comprehensive and coordinated action.

How would a digital euro work? What value would it bring when today I can already pay/charge for everything using my mobile, apps and favorite sites? Would it entail risks? So far these simple questions have not met straightforward answers, but they have sparked an extensive economic, political and technological debate.

The BIS, the ECB and the BoJ have published guidelines on the development of potential digital currencies. Monetary authorities are wary of a foreign—or poorly regulated—digital currency suddenly dominating the domestic means of payment. A CBDC would be one of the possible solutions to confront such a threat.

Libra, Facebook's proposed global digital currency, has disappointed, with several partners abandoning the initiative and severe rejection by countless authorities on both sides of the Atlantic.

The emergence of cryptocurrencies is opening the way to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). This paper highlights the pros and cons of issuing CBDCs under four different variants: from the more modest proposals to the most ambitious ones where there could be a serious disruption in financial intermediation.

Digital currencies, and more specifically, the so-called cryptocurrencies (currencies issued and administered by decentralised networks using cryptographic protocols), such as Bitcoin, first emerged almost a decade ago.

Following advances in the distributed ledger technology, central banks are assessing the issuance of digital currency. There's a range of possible schemes to adopt depending on which features of cash to hold: universality, anonymity and non-yield bearing. We analyze opportunities and challenges of 4 key schemes, that support a strategy of gradual testing and implementation