This commitment has been made, for example, in public statements from Governor Andrew Bailey here here and here and Sarah John, the Bank’s Chief Cashier, here  , from myself  . 5. The NPA is a multi-year project which will allow for real-time payments, be able to handle increasing payment volumes. It will include the rules and standards that make up various payment types, allowing the market to create new products and services as well as allowing for the development of new overlay services. 6. Open Banking’s joint regulatory oversight committee consists of the FCA, PSR, CMA and HM Treasury. 7. See for example early stage use-cases of DLT for supply chain finance reported in UCL’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies report ‘DLT in the Supply Chain  ’. 8. As set out in Money creation in the modern economy | Bank of England the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans. 9. The umbrella term ‘stablecoin’ has been used to describe a range of instruments with quite different characteristics. In particular, they may be backed by a range of financial assets, commodities or unbacked cryptoassets (which in some cases are supported by algorithmic protocols). The robustness of those backing assets and the wider safeguards for guaranteeing stability of value vary significantly across the products labelled as stablecoins. 10. See for example the Libra White Paper and related Diem technical papers 11. As set out in the Regulatory Initiatives Grid  . . 12.
But we cannot know for certain the extent and the speed at which payment stablecoins might be adopted and we may well need limits, at least initially, to ensure we avoid disruptive change that could threaten financial stability. Another important question will be whether the requirement to be redeemable in fiat money, on demand and at par and the backing asset model will be sufficient to ensure uniformity of sterling stablecoins with each other and with other forms of sterling money. This will depend to some extent on whether there are frictions in the redemption and interchange process. It has been suggested that ensuring the uniformity (or ‘singleness’ of money) requires that all transactions between different monies settle ultimately in central bank money across the books of the central bank. While it is not clear to me that this should be the case, it is clearly an issue that should be considered carefully in the design of the regulatory regime. Finally, on stablecoins, it is important to emphasise that powers in the Bill and the Bank’s regime will be for stablecoins used for payments. A digital representation of an asset with a generally stable value could be used for other purposes. It could offer a return as an investment product akin to a money market fund. Or it could be part of the credit creation process, with the loans issued in the form of stablecoins.