The transition to digital currencies and decentralized finance is accelerating
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated a number of pre-existing trends, including remote work, home-schooling, the transition to digital currency, and the adoption of crypto trading.
The Bank of Japan has published a new report on Central Bank Digital Currency
The Bank of Japan has published a new report on central bank digital currencies to study the technical aspects of a digital yen
Why are Central Banks Interested in Digital Currency
A retail Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) would be a digital and universally accessible form of money issued by central banks. Objectives= anticipate the disappearance of cash, create efficient means of payment, and strengthen regulatory controls. Some central banks are testing blockchain/DLT frameworks while others use traditional software. The future CBDC solutions would probably combine design principles of traditional distributed systems with some of the design principles of blockchains and digital “wallets” to store cryptographic keys. It’s finally about creating new protocols with the infrastructure to enable the transfer of digital value.
The age of the sovereign digital currency is here
As regulators around the world seek to delay Facebook's Libra, central banks are racing to launch sovereign digital currencies.
Bank of Japan confirms no plans for a Central Bank Digital Currency
The Governor of the Bank of Japan dismissed the possibility of the central bank issuing a digital currency at a press conference after a G20 meeting between finance leaders and central banks.
The macroeconomics of central bank issued digital currencies
This paper studies the macroeconomic consequences of a central bank granting universal, electronic, 24x7, national-currency-denominated and interest-bearing access to its balance sheet via the issuance, according to well-specified policy rules, of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). To study this issue we use a monetary-financial DSGE model, calibrated to match the United States in the pre-crisis period, that models CBDC as an imperfect substitute for bank deposits in the provision of monetary transaction services, and that models bank deposits as being created through loans or asset purchases as in Jakab and Kumhof (2015).
