Since 2016, the Bank of Canada has conducted annual surveys to monitor awareness, adoption and usage of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (Henry et al. 2018, 2019a, 2019b). This report incorporates results from the 2019 Bitcoin Omnibus Survey and the November 2020 Cash Alternative Survey. We...

This paper investigates the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on financial institutions and consumers' adoption of FinTech in payments. We find that the pandemic: [1] Initially had a negative impact on the adoption of FinTech, but favorable short-term regulatory changes have reversed some of the...

An important feature of physical cash payments is resilience, which is due to their indifference to power outages or network coverage. Many central banks are exploring issuing digital cash substitutes with similar online payment functionality. Such substitutes could incorporate novel features,...