This improvement in the functioning of payment systems represents a huge step for liquidity circulation. Third, a broader range of participants: 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 that the increasingly global nature of the market is raising sovereignty issues, including those relating to the control of data when the providers are located outside the region or jurisdiction where they offer their services. Last, the crave for blockchain technology: all around the world, market participants and big techs have launched or are preparing to launch new projects for tokens designed to serve as means of payment or settlement using the blockchain technology. We all have in mind firstgeneration crypto-assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but there are now many others coming or foreseen, like the JP Morgan Coin, the UBS’ Utility Settlement Coin or The Facebook’ Libra. 2- The development of crypto-assets are part of the innovations fueled by these underlying trends affecting payment instruments and systems, combining the search for anonymity, management of non-intermediated peer-to-peer payments and the use of entirely web-based technologies. But they also have their specificities. Actually, they have unique financial, monetary and  technical features which set them apart from the currencies and payment instruments issued by financial institutions and central banks.
In October 2019, according to CoinMarketCap, total outstanding crypto-assets represented EUR 205 billion globally; in comparison, the euro area’s M3 monetary aggregate amounted to EUR 12.5 trillion in August 2019. In addition, the diversity of views on the contributions that crypto-assets can make to the efficiency and safety of our payment systems mirrors the one in their forms. Some see crypto-assets as a disruptive innovation poised to radically change the way our monetary and financial system operates, and changing it for the better. Others believe that for the time being they do not provide a new and attractive answer to the classical trilemma payments solutions face between low cost, high execution speed and low risk, and would change the way our monetary and financial system operates for the worse. To share with you a few thoughts on this debate, speaking from the perspective of a central banker and a supervisor mindful of the benefit of innovations but also of the risks they could bring to financial and monetary stability, I will focus my remarks on: 1- whether and how crypto-assets can contribute to improve our payment systems, 2- the public policy challenges they raise, in particular for central banks, and how to address them. I – Crypto-assets and the future of payment systems 1- In the payment instrument landscape, there is currently a twin trend: the share of cash  payments dwindles while cashless payments undergo a transformation driven by behavioral changes and technological innovation.