Dinero Electrónico was a mobile payment system developed by the Banco Central del Ecuador that allowed citizens to transfer USD balances in real-time from person to person using basic cell phones. The program operated between 2014 and 2018. Key drivers of the program were increasing financial...

We assess how the cost structure of cryptocurrency mining affects the response of miners to exchange rate fluctuations and the immutability of cryptocurrency ledgers that rely on proof-of-work. We show that the amount of mining power supplied to currencies that rely on application-specific...

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...

This paper uses reinforcement learning (RL) to approximate the policy rules of banks participating in a high-value payments system. The objective of the agents is to learn a policy function for the choice of amount of liquidity provided to the system at the beginning of the day. Individual...

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a database architecture which enables the keeping and sharing of records in a distributed and decentralized way, while ensuring its integrity through the use of consensus-based validation protocols and cryptographic signatures. In principle, DLT has the...