Programming Money Without Programmable Money

Michael Lee and Antoine Martin

No 1180, Staff Reports from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Programmability is at the heart of ongoing work on the future of money and payments by central banks around the world. Despite its potential, there is growing concern that programmability conflicts with the provision of “good” money. This paper overviews key principles of “good” money and argues that the discourse on programmability inadequately differentiates between programmable money, which is generally negatively viewed, and programmable payments, which is generally accepted as part of the future. We provide a framework for programmable monetary systems that sharply distinguishes between programmable money and programmable payments. We show that our framework nests a broader set of financial arrangements and revisit the debate on programmability in the design of monetary systems.

Keywords: digital money; programmability; payments; monetary systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E42 E58 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15
Date: 2026-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mon and nep-pay
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DOI: 10.59576/sr.1180

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