The subject of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) has moved from ‘vague awareness’ in around 2016 to ‘big news’ today.
First Facebook’s Diem (launched as Libra but renamed) and then China’s e-yuan catapulted CBDCs from being a niche subject of interest to economists, central bankers and a narrow technical community to being mainstream. Speeches, papers, webinars and conferences have followed in large numbers.
To help people keep up, the publishers of Cash & Payment News™ (CPN) have decided to start publishing a weekly newsletter dedicated to CBDCs. To be known as ‘Digital Currency News™’ (DCN), it will exist in digital form accessed from the CPN website –Cash & Payment News (cashpaymentnews.com). It is freely available, no firewall or subscription required, both as a resource to visit and a place to sign up for the weekly newsletter.
The site consists of two parts, a series of articles about CBDCs and a resource section.
Although an enormous amount is written about CBDCs, the number of serious articles explaining and exploring the subject is much less. We track these and summarise them with links to the original source. If you don’t have time to read 30 pages of tightly argued prose, then our articles aim to turn those into plain English as a summary.
We have launched the site with six summaries to illustrate this approach and will now add to these each week.
We will still publish a monthly summary of CBDC news stories in Cash & Payment News, but we will now only put articles about CBDCs into DCN.
We provide a link to the Atlantic Council CBDC tracker of who is doing what around CBDCs, to key websites of authoritative sources and a CBDC glossary of terms.
The glossary is intended as a ‘go to’ reference for key terms. We would welcome feedback on what is there and what is missing.
We hope you enjoy Digital Currency News. We welcome feedback and comments.
