Privacy in Cross-border Digital Currency. A Transatlantic Approach

This paper is one of four publications launched at the inaugural Frankfurt Forum on US-European GeoEconomics held in Germany from September 27 – 29, 2022. Co-hosted by the Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center and Atlantik-Brücke, the Frankfurt Forum anchors critical work on transatlantic economic cooperation. The war in Ukraine, and the G7 response, reminded the world of the impact of transatlantic coordination. As part of the Frankfurt Forum, this new research aims to advance transatlantic dialogue from crisis response to addressing the key economic issues that will underpin the US-EU partnership over the next decade. The goal of the Frankfurt Forum is to deliver a blueprint for cooperation in four key areas: digital currencies, monetary policy, international trade, and economic statecraft

The Orkney Slew and Central Bank Digital Currencies

This Article on central bank digital currencies is motivated by a parable, The Orkney Slew, which is set in an archipelago. Based on the parable, we point out a significant economic market failure that exists in the cross-border payments realm. The analysis then focuses on real-world examples and the national security concerns, including for Anti-Money Laundering/Combatting the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) and the continued efficacy of U.S. sanctions, associated with the rapidly evolving digital payments landscape. Many central banks around the world are now cooperatively experimenting with cross-border interoperability of digital currencies. These efforts are driven by the idea of building a global network—an infrastructure—to improve global supply chains and large value cross-border payments, as well as to mitigate national security concerns. While we do not believe that such an infrastructure is necessary at this moment, we do argue that cross-border experimentation is necessary

Towards CBDC-based Machine-to-Machine Payments in Consumer IoT

The technological advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) is a well-known phenomenon that mainly affects industrial sectors but also consumers in everyday life. The use of Consumer IoT, i.e. CIoT, devices is increasing, and they are paving the way for a Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication that could highly enrich consumer services. In this paper we position ourselves in the narrowing gap between the world of CIoT and the world of money, and we explore the emerging interaction between the payment needs of a M2M Economy and the “new ways of payment”. Indeed, the advent of Distributed Ledger Technology and cryptocurrencies has introduced a tech-oriented dynamism in the monetary and financial sphere. Accordingly, central banks all over the world have started investigations into digital fiat money , i.e., “retail” Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Against this backdrop, we analyze the integration of retail CBDC models into M2M and CIoT dynamics, while heeding regulation-by-design and compliance-by/through-design methodologies, and we propose a preliminary model of integration between a two-tier retail CBDC architecture and CIoT

Building out the Crypto Economy in Europe: a Proposal for Central Bank Digital Euros

The “decentralised applications” (dApp) economy is an innovative and exciting business space that is creating economic value. The recognition of its needs such as fund-raising is only emerging in the EU Digital Finance Package supporting the new action plan for the Capital Markets Union. This article proposes that policymakers could play a further facilitative role in mobilising this economic space by considering the integration of the central bank digital euro with the dApp economy. This initiative addresses the weaknesses of the monetary order in the dApp economy and provides a departure point for the building out of the dApp economy by more enabling regulatory institutions and architecture, consistent with a vision of regulatory capitalism supporting financial and enterprise development

The impact of central bank digital currency news on the stock and cryptocurrency markets: Evidence from the TVP-VAR model

This study employs a non-linear framework to investigate the impacts of central bank digital currency (CBDC) news on the financial and cryptocurrency markets. The time-varying vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model developed by Primiceri (2005) is estimated based on weekly data from the first week of January 2015 to the last week of December 2021. The vector of endogenous variables in the VAR estimation contains the Central Bank Digital Currency uncertainty index (CBDCU), cryptocurrency policy uncertainty index, S&P 500 index, VIX, and Bitcoin price. The TVP-VAR model’s time-varying responses demonstrated that the reactions of the cryptocurrency market to central bank digital currency announcements vary remarkably over time. The impacts of the CBDC shocks on the financial market have been increasingly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the time-varying forecast error decompositions, CBDCU and VIX shocks have accounted for most of the variance in cryptocurrency uncertainty and Bitcoin return shocks, notably during the COVID-19 period

"Security Model for a Central Bank in Latin America using Blockchain"

"Banking institutions in Latin America are the target of increasingly sophisticated and advanced cyber-attacks and threats, which increase every year and leave substantial economic losses, due to the high level of global interconnection and digitization of their operations. The objective of this work is to design a model to guarantee information security in a Central Bank in Latin America using Blockchain technology. Exploratory research, observation and inductive and deductive methods are used to propose Blockchain solutions in a Central Bank. The results are a model for secure transactions in Blockchain, Smart Contract functions and a data management process. It was concluded that the security model for a central bank provides high level of information management and storage of transactions in a secure and immutable way.

Update on Poly-ADP-ribose polymerase inhibition for ovarian cancer treatment

Background: Despite standard treatment for epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC), that involves cytoreductive surgery followed by platinum-based chemotherapy, and initial high response rates to these, up to 80 % of patients experience relapses with a median progression-free survival of 12–18 months. There remains an urgent need for novel targeted therapies to improve clinical outcomes in ovarian cancer. Of the many targeted therapies currently under evaluation, the most promising strategies developed thus far are antiangiogenic agents and Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors. Particularly, PARP inhibitors are active in cells that have impaired repair of DNA by the homologous recombination (HR) pathway. Cells with mutated breast related cancer antigens (BRCA) function have HR deficiency, which is also present in a significant proportion of non-BRCA-mutated ovarian cancer (“BRCAness” ovarian cancer). The prevalence of germline BRCA mutations in EOC has historically been estimated to be around 10–15 %. However, recent reports suggest that this may be a gross underestimate, especially in women with high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC). Main body of the abstract: The emergence of the DNA repair pathway as a rational target in various cancers led to the development of the PARP inhibitors. The concept of tumor-selective synthetic lethality heralded the beginning of an eventful decade, culminating in the approval by regulatory authorities both in Europe as a maintenance therapy and in the United States treatment for advanced recurrent disease of the first oral PARP inhibitor, olaparib, for the treatment of BRCA-mutated ovarian cancer patients. Other PARP inhibitors are clearly effective in this disease and, within the next years, the results of ongoing randomized trials will clarify their respective roles. Conclusion: This review will discuss the different PARP inhibitors in development and the potential use of this class of agents in the future. Moreover, combination strategies involving PARP inhibitors are likely to receive increasing attention. The utility of PARP inhibitors combined with cytotoxic chemotherapy is of doubtful value, because of enhanced toxicity of this combination; while, more promising strategies include the combination with antiangiogenic agents, or with inhibitors of the P13K/AKT pathway and new generation of immunotherapy