Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

Digital currencies have attracted strong interest in recent years and have the potential to become widely adopted for use in making payments. Public authorities and central banks around the world are closely monitoring developments in digital currencies and studying their implications for the...

In this paper, we gather together the minimum units of Bitcoin identity (the individual addresses), and group them into approximations of business entities, what we call “super clusters”. While these clusters can remain largely anonymous, we are able to ascribe many of them to particular...

Digital currencies store balances in anonymous electronic addresses. We analyze the tradeoffs between the safety and convenience of aggregating balances in addresses, electronic wallets and banks. In our model, agents balance the risk of theft of a large account with the cost to safeguarding a...

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...

In this study, we provide a systemic perspective on central bank digital currencies (CBDC). We separate existing proposals for CBDCs into the perspective of new payment objects, made available by central banks to a broader public, and new payment systems, operated by central banks. From a...

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a shock to retail payment behaviour. How have the changes differed across countries? What do they imply for the future of cash and digital payments? We assemble a new "Future of Payments" database on retail payment behaviour for up to 95 countries over September...