Washington, D.C. – Today, BPI welcomed the release of a new whitepaper aimed at advancing the policy debate regarding the future of money. The paper, published by a group of payments industry participants, outlines a distributed ledger technology solution called the Regulated Liability Network. The RLN presents one potential avenue for upgrading sovereign currency systems with shared ledger technology.
What BPI is saying:
“The RLN is an intriguing concept. It promises to bring potential efficiencies from distributed ledger technology to the world of payments, without creating the same financial stability and economic growth problems of a central bank digital currency. With RLN, commercial bank money and central bank money maintain their current roles, but both could transfer on a blockchain. As a result, they could displace other less regulated and less safe money-like instruments whose current selling point is 24*7 on-chain availability,” said Greg Baer, BPI president and CEO.
What’s at stake:
The future of money is often presented as a binary choice – a digital money exclusively issued by central banks (in the form of central bank digital currency) or by non-regulated issuers. The RLN demonstrates that shared ledger technology may be applied to all regulated monies (e.g., central bank money, commercial bank money and e-money) on a common platform.
One potential solution:
Blockchain technology has created a wave of innovation at the edge of the regulatory perimeter. The RLN whitepaper is written in support of sovereign currencies and might point the way to a more functionally rich financial system that is still compliant with all existing laws and regulations. The whitepaper doesn’t present the RLN as the only answer; rather, it seeks to offer one potential alternative that fits between CBDC and stablecoin proposals.
The objective:
As the policy debate around the future of money continues to take shape, the RLN seeks to offer a potential solution that helps ensure the supremacy of the sovereign currency system and confront potential challenges from the growth of non-regulated, non-sovereign currencies.
###
About Bank Policy Institute.
The Bank Policy Institute (BPI) is a nonpartisan public policy, research and advocacy group, representing the nation’s leading banks and their customers. Our members include universal banks, regional banks and the major foreign banks doing business in the United States. Collectively, they employ almost 2 million Americans, make nearly half of the nation’s small business loans, and are an engine for financial innovation and economic growth.
Media Contact
Sean Oblack
sean.oblack@bpi.com
