Central Bank Digital Currencies and the Future of Money - A New Theoretical Framework, Comparative Insights from Global Case Studies, and the Role of Asset Tokenisation

This research presents a comprehensive analysis of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), their potential benefits, challenges, and implications for financial systems. The research is structured across three interconnected papers. The first paper establishes a theoretical contribution by developing a comprehensive framework, designed to assess CBDCs. This research advances novel approaches to model the complexity of CBDCs, by introducing a framework to systematically evaluate and compare distinctive CDBCs’ implementations. The research provides insights into effective policies for contemporary economic challenges and offers recommendations for policymakers and national authorities considering CBDCs’ implementation. The framework developed in the first paper is applied in the second paper, for comparing three CBDCs, the Sand Dollar launched by the Central Bank of Bahamas, the eNaira established by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the e-CNY developed by the People’s Bank of China. The second paper deliver objective assessments of the CBDCs’ implementation, analysing the policy and design choices, the technological and governance frameworks, the socio-economic integration strategies, and the sustainability approaches. The comparative study of the three CBDCs reveals valuable information about their national strategies and implementation priorities. The third paper investigates the potential integration of CBDCs with asset tokenisation methods for financial instruments. The study delivers a theoretical contribution by examining how asset tokenisation functions and may integrate with CBDCs for settlement purposes, studying the strengths and weaknesses of this novel approach. This research studies how CBDCs can represent an efficient instrument for settling tokenised digital assets, and it reveals the implications of asset tokenisation within the financial sector, along with its future development potential. Collectively, the research addresses theoretical and analytical foundations in the first paper; it provides comparative insights on global CBDCs’ case studies in the second paper, and a future-looking perspective on the interplay between CBDCs and the nascent asset tokenisation field in the third paper, offering lessons learned for central banks, policymakers and consumers, and a forward-looking perspective on the future of money.