IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eth/wpswif/20-342.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Minting Mold for the eFranc: A Policy Paper

Author

Listed:
  • Hans Gersbach

    (CER-ETH –- Center of Economic Research and CEPR, ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

  • Roger Wattenhofer

    (Distributed Computing Group, ETH Zurich, Switzerland)

Abstract

We suggest a blueprint for an eFranc as a possible complement for the Swiss monetary system to ensure the long-term stability of its money. An eFranc is a non-interest-bearing digital form of the legal tender available to the public. The public can convert banknotes or part of its bank deposits into eFrancs, subject to the banks’ ability to obtain the corresponding amount of eFrancs from the central bank. There is free conversion of eFrancs into bank deposits (and into banknotes). For the technical implementation of the eFranc, we suggest a two-layer system combining a permissioned asynchronous blockchain without consensus which provides a secure environment for validating transactions (base layer) plus a peer-to-peer payment network (top layer).

Suggested Citation

  • Hans Gersbach & Roger Wattenhofer, 2020. "A Minting Mold for the eFranc: A Policy Paper," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 20/342, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    • Handle: RePEc:eth:wpswif:20-342
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/mtec/cer-eth/cer-eth-dam/documents/working-papers/WP-20-342.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Charles M. Kahn & Francisco Rivadeneyra & Tsz-Nga Wong, 2018. "Should the Central Bank Issue E-money?," Staff Working Papers 18-58, Bank of Canada.
    2. Raphael Auer & Rainer Boehme, 2020. "The technology of retail central bank digital currency," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    3. McLeay, Michael & Radia, Amar & Thomas, Ryland, 2014. "Money creation in the modern economy," Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, Bank of England, vol. 54(1), pages 14-27.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Raphael Auer & Rainer Boehme, 2021. "Central bank digital currency: the quest for minimally invasive technology," BIS Working Papers 948, Bank for International Settlements.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dirk Niepelt, 2020. "Monetary Policy with Reserves and CBDC: Optimality, Equivalence, and Politics," Working Papers 20.05, Swiss National Bank, Study Center Gerzensee.
    2. Raphael A. Auer & Giulio Cornelli & Jon Frost, 2020. "Rise of the Central Bank Digital Currencies: Drivers, Approaches and Technologies," CESifo Working Paper Series 8655, CESifo.
    3. Dionysopoulos, Lambis & Marra, Miriam & Urquhart, Andrew, 2024. "Central bank digital currencies: A critical review," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    4. Arauz, Andrés & Garratt, Rodney & Ramos F., Diego F., 2021. "Dinero Electrónico: The rise and fall of Ecuador's central bank digital currency," Latin American Journal of Central Banking (previously Monetaria), Elsevier, vol. 2(2).
    5. Aldar C-F. Chan, 2021. "UTXO in Digital Currencies: Account-based or Token-based? Or Both?," Papers 2109.09294, arXiv.org.
    6. Schilling, Linda & Fernández-Villaverde, Jesús & Uhlig, Harald, 2024. "Central bank digital currency: When price and bank stability collide," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(C).
    7. Li, Jiaqi, 2023. "Predicting the demand for central bank digital currency: A structural analysis with survey data," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 73-85.
    8. Morales-Resendiz, Raúl & Ponce, Jorge & Picardo, Pablo & Velasco, Andrés & Chen, Bobby & Sanz, León & Guiborg, Gabriela & Segendorff, Björn & Vasquez, José Luis & Arroyo, John & Aguirre, Illich & Hayn, 2021. "Implementing a retail CBDC: Lessons learned and key insights," Latin American Journal of Central Banking (previously Monetaria), Elsevier, vol. 2(1).
    9. Marcelo A. T. Aragão, 2021. "A Few Things You Wanted to Know about the Economics of CBDCs, but were Afraid to Model: a survey of what we can learn from who has done," Working Papers Series 554, Central Bank of Brazil, Research Department.
    10. Markus Merz, 2021. "Contemporaneous financial intermediation," Digital Finance, Springer, vol. 3(1), pages 25-44, March.
    11. Tercero-Lucas, David, 2023. "Central bank digital currencies and financial stability in a modern monetary system," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 69(C).
    12. Ariah Klages-Mundt & Dominik Harz & Lewis Gudgeon & Jun-You Liu & Andreea Minca, 2020. "Stablecoins 2.0: Economic Foundations and Risk-based Models," Papers 2006.12388, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2020.
    13. Jay Cullen, 2022. "“Economically inefficient and legally untenable”: constitutional limitations on the introduction of central bank digital currencies in the EU," Journal of Banking Regulation, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 23(1), pages 31-41, March.
    14. Bihari, Péter, 2015. "Odüsszeuszi utazás - az előretekintő iránymutatás tapasztalatai [An Odysseian journey - experience with forward guidance]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(7), pages 749-766.
    15. Svetlana Abramova & Rainer Böhme & Helmut Elsinger & Helmut Stix & Martin Summer, 2022. "What can CBDC designers learn from asking potential users? Results from a survey of Austrian residents (Svetlana Abramova, Rainer Böhme, Helmut Elsinger, Helmut Stix, Martin Summer)," Working Papers 241, Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank).
    16. Julien Pinter, 2022. "Monetarist arithmetic at COVID‐19 time: A take on how not to misapply the quantity theory of money," Economic Notes, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, vol. 51(2), July.
    17. Jamus Jerome Lim, 2021. "The limits of central bank independence for inflation performance," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 186(3), pages 309-335, March.
    18. Lenz, Rainer, 2015. "Banking 2025: The Bank of the Future," EconStor Preprints 110466, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    19. Luis Angeles, 2020. "Four Phases in the History of Money," Working Papers 2020_24, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    20. Jiahua Xu & Nikhil Vadgama, 2021. "From banks to DeFi: the evolution of the lending market," Papers 2104.00970, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    eFranc; Swiss Monetary System; Financial Stability; Swiss National Bank; Proof-of-stake Blockchains;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eth:wpswif:20-342. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iwethch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.