fintech and cross - border payments ”, speech at the ripple – central summit, new york. 6 ( 6 ) carney m. ( 2018 ), “ the future of money ”, speech to the inaugural scottish economics conference, edinburgh. 7 ( 7 ) ali, r., barrdear, j., clews, r. and j. southgate ( 2014 ), “ innovations in payment technologies and the emergence of digital currencies ”, bank of england quarterly bulletin, vol. 54, no. 3, pages 262 – 75. 8 ( 8 ) barrdear, j. and m. kumhof ( 2016 ), “ the macroeconomics of central bank issued digital currencies ”, no. 605, bank of england. 9 ( 9 ) agarwal, r. and m. kimball ( 2015 ), “ breaking through the zero lower bound ”, international monetary fund working paper, no 15 / 224. 10 ( 10 ) mersch, y. ( 2018 ), “ virtual or virtueless? the evolution of money in the digital age ”, speech at the official monetary and financial institutions forum, london. 11 ( 11 ) carstens a. ( 2018 ), “ money in the digital age : what role for central banks? ”, speech at the goethe 5 / 6 bis central bankers'speeches university. 6 / 6 bis central bankers'speeches

crypto - ecosystem, occasionally issuing warnings for crypto - exchanges and brokers, initial coin offerings, futures, exchanged traded funds etc. to this date, some countries have tried to ban crypto - assets altogether ( e. g. morocco ) while others are fostering their development ( e. g. malta ). on the other hand, the distributed ledger technology ( dlt ) underlying some digital currencies schemes, offers potential benefits that go far beyond digital currencies themselves. a distributed ledger technology is used as a decentralized minting and transaction processing platform, with copies of all the transactions ever performed distributed on a public network of computing servers. a transaction on such a network is completed when the majority of the servers in the network achieve consensus that it is valid, using cryptographic identification techniques ( privatepublic keys and hash functions ), thus eliminating the need for a trusted party ( e. g. central bank ). dlt is likely to change mainly securities clearing and settlement operations. a key feature of distributed ledger networks as payment platforms is that the entire history of transactions – which is immutable - is available to all transactions verifiers in real time. a copy of the transaction ledger is stored in all participating agents data centers and thus cannot be easily compromised ; at the same time it is easily verifiable and readily auditable. bank of canada experimented on a dlt - based wholesale payment system ( the so called “ project jasper ” ) and concluded that core wholesale payment systems function quite efficiently but there could be some benefits from the interaction with a larger dlt ecosystem of financial market infrastructures, including cross - border transactions4. in a recent speech, the imf states that dlt could be applied to various processes in cross boarder payments and gains would be most evident in efficiency5. bank of england has expressed the view that there is scope for central banking and the financial system more broadly to benefit from the settlement technology6. but many colleagues stress that the dlt is not perfected yet as technology and it has not been adequately tried. to central banks it remains at an experimental stage at present. central bank digital currencies ( cbdc ) i will now move to an interrelated discussion that focuses on the desirability of central banks to provide digital currencies through distributed ledger technologies in a decentralized fashion. lately, the prospect of central bank cryptocurrencies is attracting attention. central banks are