This paper challenges widespread preconceptions about cryptocurrencies and other crypto assets. They are not monetary tokens or objects but accounting entries (like deposit money and custodian bank security accounts). Their innovation is not ‘decentralisation' but use of single (rather than...

In the context of recent developments with cryptocurrencies, as well as the potential rise of central bank digital currencies, we present a new visualisation of money. Using three novel figures, we distinguish between the relevant mechanisms, technologies, recordkeeping, and transactions of...

Placing bank and fiat money off balance sheet, using the distributed transaction technologies of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, avoids the need for centralised payment settlement (in central bank money). Just like earlier proposals for ‘narrow-banking' or 100-percent reserving this...

This paper analyses the challenges for financial regulation posed by new financial technologies. It provides a conceptual framework incorporating both new financial products and services and new institutional arrangements including decentralised finance without intermediaries. Four possible...

This paper – drawing on interviews with twenty-two senior payments professionals – documents the business processes employed in the execution of international payments and discusses how international payments might be improved through the adoption of central bank digital currencies (CBDC)....

This paper is an examination of adoption of distributed ledgers in financial services. We review more than one hundred initiatives and a large practitioner literature, considering fourteen areas of application and seven case studies, in order to provide both a conceptual analysis of these...