Which forms of digital money are emerging?
The global monetary landscape is diversifying into a multi-asset ecosystem where central bank money, commercial bank liabilities and non-bank private assets operate in parallel. Rather than converging onto a single universal distributed ledger, three principal digital money structures have emerged across wholesale and retail markets:
1. tokenised commercial bank deposits - represent existing fiat claims recorded on programmable ledgers. These instruments preserve established prudential regulation, deposit insurance and credit creation mechanisms whilst unlocking automated settlement and smart contract execution. Bank of England Governor, Andrew Bailey, has highlighted that tokenised deposits allow commercial banks to offer programmable payments conditional upon delivery or identity verification without disrupting the money supply.
2. regulated stablecoins - backed 1:1 by high-quality liquid assets, they offer rapid, low-cost cross-platform trans…
