Crypto-assets and digital currencies: economic implications

5 February 2027

The webinar provides an in-depth understanding of digital currencies, crypto-assets and tokenized finance, examining their economic functions, their implications for the financial system, and their role in the ongoing transformation of the monetary system.

The starting point is the historical evolution of money - a history driven by the challenge of making money supply sufficiently flexible to meet demand, without allowing that flexibility to become a source of instability. As payment technologies have become progressively more abstract, the institutional frameworks surrounding them have had to evolve accordingly. Each major transition, in the technologies that govern the issuance, transfer and storage of money and in the frameworks built around them, can be read as an attempt to combine greater flexibility with deeper institutional anchoring of trust. Stability of value - what distinguishes money from other stores of value - provides the key lens for assessing which new digital assets are genuinely capable of performing the functions of money, and which are not.

After laying this foundation, the course turns to the forms of money at the heart of the modern monetary system - cash, central bank reserves, bank money and electronic money - a two-tier system in which public money and private money coexist and complement each other. In this system, central bank money provides the anchor for stability, while private money - issued by banks and other intermediaries - delivers the flexibility needed to support economic activity. Understanding this architecture is essential to assessing the ways and extent in which digital innovation may reshape the monetary system.

Building on this framework, the course examines crypto-assets, distinguishing between those without an underlying asset, such as Bitcoin, whose value depends entirely on demand dynamics, and those pegged to currencies or other reference assets, such as stablecoins. It then analyses the tokenization of financial instruments, which is redefining how traditional assets are issued, traded and settled. The course concludes with an examination of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), assessing the motivations behind their introduction and their implications for the economic and financial system.