The Rise of Crypto-assets : Cool Breeze or Tsunami in Balance of Payments Statistics?

Recent years have shown a significant acceleration in the adoption and development of blockchains or Distributed Ledger Technologies, particularly in the financial sector. Alongside the well-known and widely used Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies have been developed and have become popular (Ethereum, XRP...). As a result, digital wallets and exchange platforms are becoming commonly used technologies. Meanwhile, different instruments are being developed rapidly, which could be launched and reach scale in the near future; this is the case of stablecoins, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Besides technical details and contingent regulatory requirements, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate and highlight the impacts of such instruments on the compilation of external statistics. After a brief digression on the features and classification of digital assets, the potential effects on some BoP items are discussed (the current and financial account)