Central bank digital currencies: An innovative tool for enhancing domestic and cross-border payments and settlements

“Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)” is a relatively new but very fast developing story. The rush of central banks all over the world toward CBDCs proof-of-concept studying and piloting in recent years, as well as somewhere already the practical implementation of their own digital currencies have been motivated by a number of factors that are analyzed in this study. The potential gains of CBDC domestic issue and application can be distinctly outlined today. But, the leading central banks, following to the basic principle “do no harm!”, are acting as carefully and slowly as possible in order to avoid the negative consequences of an abrupt shifts in the contemporary financial landscape. However, successful progress of the People’s Bank of China in piloting the digital yuan, as well as the launch of CBDCs in the Bahamas, Nigeria, Jamaica and the countries of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, not only stimulate other states to intensify their own research developments for CBDC, but also raise the question of future implementation of CBDCs for international settlements. The study’s key hypothesis, put forward by the author, is that the inevitable approaching issue of central bank digital currencies will create unique opportunities to enhance significantly the quality of settlement and payment systems not only domestically, but, and especially, internationally. CBDCs’ implementation for cross-border transactions will help to overcome the long-known but still unresolved hurdles of the existing archaic infrastructure of international settlements: low speed, high costs, limited access and insufficient transparency.