The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) ran a global retail CBDC challenge competition with the results announced at the Singapore Fintech festival. It received 300 submissions from over 50 countries.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) wrote an article for the Annual Review of Economics that laid out work done on Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) to date. The paper puts CBDCs in context of all payment methods and considers why and how CBDCs are being developed and the challenges central banks are grappling with.

The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) has issued a paper ‘What does digital money mean for emerging market and developing economies?’. The paper questions whether stablecoins are the answer to all problems and whether other digital solutions have a role to play.

Whether CBDCs are designed as token- or account-based, regulations such as those governing money laundering and the funding of terrorism mean total anonymity/privacy is not possible. Given that while privacy is highly valued in principle, the public take little to no action to safeguard their privacy in practice, is it so important?

With under 100 days to go to the winter Olympics, China is encouraging domestic and foreign retailers to enable payment using the e-Yuan, China’s CBDC. Although foreign visitors will not be able to travel to China for the Olympics, it continues to work towards having the e-Yuan up and running.

The subject of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) has moved from ‘vague awareness’ in around 2016 to ‘big news’ today. To help people keep up, the publishers of Cash & Payment News™ (CPN) have decided to start publishing a weekly newsletter dedicated to CBDCs.

This paper opens asking three questions from a legal perspective; Do central banks (CBs) have the authority to issue digital currency? Can Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) be real ‘currency’? Should digital currency be legal tender?

In April 2020 Harro Boven and Peter Wieters published a Dutch National Bank (DNB) Occasional Study on the objectives, pre-conditions and design choices for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Harro wrote an abridged version that was used in Payers December publication about CBDCs which is summarised here.

This year the Bank of Canada has published 9 staff analytical notes and staff working papers discussing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). As the most recent paper says, as a contingency the Bank of Canada is looking to build its capability to issue a cash-like retail denominated CBDC.

On 12th October the European Central Bank (ECB) opened a public consultation on the creation of a Digital Euro, a Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). The logic is that the increased usage of digital payments may mean that a Digital Euro is needed to safeguard citizens.