A well-functioning monetary system is characterized by public and private forms of money that exchange at par as value flows freely between them. This is essential for efficient transacting and contracting in a market economy. A relevant retail public money - whether in the form of cash, a...

Providing bank notes is one of the Bank of Canada’s core functions. The Bank is therefore interested in whether cash is adequately distributed across society, and this also influences the Bank’s thinking on issuing a central bank digital currency. We provide a perspective on these issues by...

An anonymous credential mechanism is a set of protocols that allows users to obtain credentials from an organization and demonstrate ownership of these credentials without compromising users' privacy. In this work, we construct the first secret-free and quantum-safe credential mechanism. The...

In this paper, we discuss whether the ability of individuals to convert commercial bank money (i.e., bank deposits) into central bank money is fundamentally important for the monetary system. This is a significant question since the use of cash - the only form of central bank money that the...

This paper presents simulation results for Canada's new large-value payments system: Lynx. We simulate the settlement process of Lynx using a large sample of payments observed in the current system (LVTS), taking the initial level of liquidity as given. We calculate the resulting liquidity...

We use a simple model to study whether private payment systems based on bank deposits can provide the optimal level of safety. In the model, bank deposits backed by projects are subject to default risk that can be mitigated by a depositor's ex ante and ex post monitoring. Safe payment...

Privacy is a feature inherent to the use of cash for payments. With steadily increasing market shares of commercial digital payments platforms, privacy in payments may no longer be attainable in the future. In this paper, we explore the potential welfare impact of reductions in privacy in...

Should a central bank take over the provision of e-money, a circulable electronic liability? We discuss how e-money technology changes the tradeoff between public and private provision, and the tradeoff between e-money and a central bank's existing liabilities like bank notes and reserves. The...