Towards Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)

Module description

Since the introduction of Bitcoin through Nakamoto in 2008, the topic of cryptocurrencies has steadily gained in importance in public discourse. Cryptocurrencies, created with the intention to act as a store of value, medium of exchange or unit of account, offer the possibility to act as substitutes to cash and traditional methods of payment for individuals.

With the rise in market capitalization and organizations like Facebook planning to introduce their own cryptocurrencies, the question of if and how central banks should react to this development has naturally arisen given their role in managing money supply for the whole economy. Hereby, the use of blockchain, or distributed ledger technology (DLT) are only two possible options to technically implement a CBDC.

In countries like Sweden and Uruguay, the introduction of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) – a digital form of legal tender provided by a central bank – is already being discussed and piloted. Sweden for instance is working on an eKrona project (Skingsley 2016). Uruguay has already finished its e-Peso pilot project successfully with voluntary participants (Bergara and Ponce 2018). In Oktober 2020 the European Central Bank (ECB) has issued new work on the digital Euro and is intensifying its reasearch into such a new type of currency.

This seminar aims to introduce students to the topic of CBDC. Students will be working individually or in groups on various topics on the subject and may apply theoretical as well as empirical research methodologies like systematic literature reviews or quantitative user studies.

The aim is to gather legal, technical, economical and societal insights on the topic to gain a thorough understanding on the consequences that the introduction of a CBDC might have in the future.

Topics:

1. Stakeholder Analysis of CBDC
2. Comparison of Stablecoins and CBDC
3. Privacy and anonymity in CBDC
4. Usage adoption of CBDC from individuals. 
5. Literature review on CBDC pilot projects of central banks
6. Technology and features of a CBDC
7. Monetary aspects of CBDC
8. Legal Analysis on CBDC
9. Trust in money

• Other: Literature review on cryptocurrencies in information systems
• Other: Feel free to come up with your own ideas regarding CBDC or a digital Euro

Please find more information on the particular topics on the following slides: CBDC Topics

Learning goals and Competency

• Ability to understand and perform a systematic literature review (LGB-1)
• Basic understanding of privacy assessment methods and CBDC (LGB-3)
• Demonstrate good writing and presentation skills (LGB-7)
• Demonstrate good organisational skills and collaboration in working in groups (LGB-6)
• Perform empirical and quantitative research in order to understand DBCD stakeholder expectation and concerns (LGB-2)

1) Methodology

• vom Brocke, J., Simons, A., Riemer, K., Niehaves, B., Plattfaut, R., & Cleven, A. (2015). Standing on the shoulders of giants: Challenges and recommendations of literature search in Information Systems research. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 37(1), Article 9, 205-224.
• vom Brocke, J., Simons, A., Niehaves, B., Riemer, K., Plattfaut, R., & Cleven, A. (2009). Reconstructing the Giant: On the Importance of Rigour in Documenting the Literature Search Process. In ECIS 2009 Proceedings (pp. 2206–2217).
• Recker, J. (2012). Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner’s Guide. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30048-6 

2) Topics

• CBDC: Tronnier, F., Recker, M., Hamm, P. (2020). Towards Central Bank Digital Currency – A Systematic Literature Review
• Stablecoins: Mita, M., Ito, K., Ohsawa, S., & Tanaka, H. (2019). What is Stablecoin?: A Survey on Price Stabilization Mechanisms for Decentralized Payment Systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.06037.
• Privacy: Smith, H. J., Dinev, T., & Xu, H. (2011). Theory and Review Information Privacy Research: An Interdisciplinary Review. MIS Quarterly, 35(4), 989–1015.

Dates of this seminar:

• 24.11.2020 - 9:00 - 17:00 (very likely much quicker finished ):
  Online- Kick-Off: Using this room https://bbb.surfcloud.nl/b/fre-m9z-qdz

• Cancelled! 27.11.2020 - 10:00 - 12:30 
  The seminar will happen without an exam.
• 25. - 28.01.2020 - 9:00 - 17:00
  Student presentations on the topics chosen at the Kick-Off meeting.

Dear students, due to the new rules of the examination office, the eExam has been cancelled!

The new weighting of seminar papr and presentation is: Seminar paper grading (70%) and presentation (30).

If you already want to prepare for the seminar and the Kick-Off meeting, please contact me directly (frederic.tronnier@m-chair.de) for the papers listed in the literature section.

Best,
Frédéric Tronnier