Legal Aspects of Central Bank Digital Currency: Central Bank and Monetary Law Considerations

Wouter Bossu, Masaru Itatani and Arthur D. P. Rossi

No 2020/254, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: This paper analyzes the legal foundations of central bank digital currency (CBDC) under central bank and monetary law. Absent strong legal foundations, the issuance of CBDC poses legal, financial and reputational risks for central banks. While the appropriate design of the legal framework will up to a degree depend on the design features of the CBDC, some general conclusions can be made. First, most central bank laws do not currently authorize the issuance of CBDC to the general public. Second, from a monetary law perspective, it is not evident that “currency” status can be attributed to CBDC. While the central bank law issue can be solved through rather straithforward law reform, the monetary law issue poses fundmental legal policy challenges.

Keywords: Central Bank Digital Currency; CBDC; Blockchain; Cryptocurrency; Crypto assets; WP; central bank law; monetary unit; book money; digital currency; law reform; token-based CBDC; Central Bank digital currencies; Currencies; Central bank legislation; Legal support in revenue administration; Payment systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51
Date: 2020-11-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-law, nep-mon and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=49827 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2020/254

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Akshay Modi ().