His comments reflect the fact that crypto-assets have unique financial, monetary and technical features that set them apart from the currencies and payment instruments issued by financial institutions and central banks and which form the foundation of our monetary system in Europe. They have no issuer for whom the assets act as a guarantee of value. They do not have a guaranteed fixed exchange rate with the currency issued by the central bank, which forms the basis of our payment system because it is the only one with legal tender status, i.e. which must be accepted by everyone. And they rely for their circulation on blockchain, a decentralised and distributed ledger system using cryptographic techniques. These unique features largely explain the widely varying views that we hear today about the outlook for crypto-assets, keeping in mind that, for now, they constitute a marginal share of holdings of economic agents and within the global economy. At their peak in January 2018, total outstanding crypto-assets represented EUR 330 billion; in comparison, the euro area’s M1 monetary aggregate amounted to EUR 7.5 trillion. Some see crypto-assets as disruptive innovations poised to radically overhaul the way that our monetary and financing system works, changing it for the better. Others believe that these are innovations that still need to find their market.
They are no longer confined to cards, as we are seeing with the rise of mobile payments. A broader range of participants: I am thinking here about how the payments market has expanded to include competition from big techs and major retailers, which are following a wide range of strategies in this respect. The flipside of this trend is the increasingly global nature of the market, which is raising sovereignty and independence issues, including the question of control of data with respect to the American and Chinese tech giants. Payment is becoming less prominent: nowadays the actual act of paying is becoming less visible, as it is combined seamlessly within the overall transaction process to minimise the impact on the payer. We are seeing this shift in online payments, for example, which are designed to be increasingly fluid through solutions such as one-click buying. Availability of payment services: payment services are becoming more available, ignoring physical borders and time constraints to satisfy customer demand for instant, continuous and uniform payment services, as economic agents become ever more mobile. 2. The development of crypto-assets naturally forms part of these underlying trends affecting payment instruments, combining the search for anonymity, management of non-intermediated peer-to-peer payments and the use of entirely web-based technologies. But crypto-assets are also different because of their financial, monetary and technological features that I mentioned in my introduction.