Now, onto this scene lands crypto and digital money. Note, I did not describe crypto – in its unbacked form – as money. It isn't. For money to fulfil its function as a means of  2/6  BIS - Central bankers' speeches  payment it requires stability of value. This is clearly not true of unbacked crypto. It could be a bet, a highly speculative investment or a collectible, but note that it has no intrinsic value, so buyer be very aware. More interesting is the creation of so-called 'stable coins' or digital currency, which purport at least to be money as a means of payment. But, as we have seen, they do not have assured value, and in the work we have done at the Bank of England we have concluded that the public should expect assured value in digital money, and confidence in this is needed to underpin financial stability. For stable coins to function as money they will need to have the characteristics of, and be regulated as, inside money. Meanwhile, a lot of work is going on to assess the future of digital money, including Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Digital money is not new. Digital money in the form of commercial bank deposits and commercial bank reserves at the central bank have existed for many decades. What is new is the idea of broadly available retail digital money.
Faced with this situation, with the dual objective of easing financing conditions and addressing emerging signs of financial fragmentation among euro area countries, on the ECB Governing Council we approved a package of measures which acted in two main dimensions: asset purchases and liquidity-providing operations. First, through the pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP), and second, through targeted longerterm refinancing operations (TLTROs). These measures have subsequently been expanded and strengthened (most recently, in December), owing to the persistence of the pandemic and its negative effects on the economy. I would now like to discuss each of these measures in greater detail. The PEPP, a programme for the purchase of public and private-sector bonds, was launched in March 2020. Its flexibility is what sets it apart from the previous asset purchase programme (APP). Thus, whereas the APP is relatively rigid in terms of how the asset purchases are distributed both over time and across jurisdictions, during the most critical months of the pandemic the PEPP has allowed us to concentrate purchases on those countries whose financing conditions have, at any given time, been subject to a greater degree of tightening. 2  Thanks to this flexibility, together with its large initial envelope, the announcement of the creation of the PEPP on 18 March served to substantially reduce interest rates on sovereign debt (especially that of the countries hardest hit by the health crisis at that moment, such as Italy and Spain).