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"US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) do not offer specific guidance for the treatment of digital assets, and, to date, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has decided not to add a project on accounting for cryptocurrencies. For those reasons, a company's accounting function must draw on various pertinent sections of US GAAP to facilitate accounting for digital assets. First, the accounting will be determined by what the company is accounting for. What is it investing in? Practice has settled on accounting for certain digital assets, like Bitcoin, as an indefinite-lived intangible asset.3 That means it does not meet the accounting definition of cash or a cash equivalent, financial instrument, or inventory. Needless to say, the accounting principles prevailing today were largely established at a time when digital assets were not yet even contemplated."

FIS published its 2023 Global Payments Report that examines how consumers pay today both in-store and online across 40 global markets. In 2022, there were almost 70 real-time payment (RTP) schemes providing high-speed payment rails that helped drive account-to-account (A2A) payments to account for $525 billion in global e-commerce transaction value, versus $463 billion in 2021. A2A payments flow directly - and often instantly - from a consumer's bank account to a merchant's account, helping to drive down the cost of acceptance for merchants. The growth of A2A in the U.S. mirrors the global trend, with A2A accounting for 9% of e-commerce transaction value in 2022. This is projected to keep growing, fueled in part by consumer use cases arising from the 2023 launch of the Federal Reserve's FedNow payments network, and the existing RTP from The Clearing House and Zelle real-time payment networks

"Crypto accounting, and the lack of authoritative crypto-specific accounting guidance, has long been an issue for the crypto industry, and accounting professionals seeking to offer advice to internal colleagues or external clients. After years of lobbying and requests, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), has begun to integrate crypto accounting research, and the development of technical guidance, into plans moving forward."

"This ISDA paper explores the accounting implications of recent investment in and use of digital assets, including, but not limited to, cryptocurrencies. The paper aims to identify and illustrate how digital assets are accounted for and reported under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP), as upheld by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), including comparisons with the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), as upheld by the International Accounting Standards Board."

"The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City revoked the so-called master account of a payments firm that came to prominence earlier this year when Republican senators raised questions over how that account had been granted, according to a letter sent by Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.). In that letter, obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Toomey asked for more details about the Kansas City Fed's decision to terminate the account for the Colorado-based Reserve Trust. The decision to grant that account had faced scrutiny earlier this year after Mr. Toomey and other Republicans questioned Sarah Bloom Raskin, then President's Biden nominee for a seat on the Fed's board of governors, over her possible role in helping Reserve Trust to secure the master account when she served on its board."

"The UTXO design of Bitcoin exhibits partially characteristics of a token-based system and partially characteristics of an account-based system. A discussion on the difficulty to implement the economic notion of tokens in the digital domain, along with an exposition of the design of UTXO, is given in order to discuss why UTXO-based systems should be viewed as account-based according to the classical economic notion. Besides, a detailed comparison between UTXO-based systems and account-based systems is presented. Using the data structure of the system state representation as the defining feature to distinguish digital token-based and account-based systems is therefore suggested. This extended definition of token-based systems covers both physical and digital tokens while neatly distinguishing token-based and account-based systems."

The Bank of England unveiled a new type of omnibus account as part of its real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service. Under the new model, an operator of a payment system can hold funds in the omnibus account to fund their participants' balances with central bank money. An omnibus account co-mingles funds from different entities for the purposes of wholesale settlement. The new type of account is not limited to wholesale transactions such as buying gilts, but can be used to settle transactions on behalf of customers, such as a small business paying a supplier.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has denied Custodia Bank's application for a master account, according to a U.S. district court filing. The Kansas City Fed disclosed the rejection in a motion to dismiss filed with the U.S. District Court of Wyoming on Friday afternoon. Custodia is suing both the Kansas City Fed and the Fed Board of Governors over its long-delayed application for a master account, which grants access to the Fed's various financial services, including its payment system. In its filing, the Kansas City Fed and the Board of Governors argue that the ruling should render Custodia's lawsuit moot. The bank had sought to pressure the Fed to make a decision about its two-year-old application, arguing that it had been subject to an unreasonable delay. Nathan Miller, a spokesman for Custodia, said the bank plans to continue its litigation against the Fed, noting that the bank intends to challenge whether the bank has congressional authority to pick and choose which institutions can have master accounts. Custodia and others argue that any state chartered depository is entitled to master account access. https://twitter.com/profjuliehill/status/1619116401163382784

"In this paper, we propose a completely new approach that does not achieve anonymity by including more accounts in the transaction, but instead makes the transaction itself ``smarter''. Our key contribution is to provide a mechanism whereby a compact transaction can be used to correctly update all accounts. Intuitively, this guarantees that all accounts are equally likely to be the recipients/sender of such a transaction. We, therefore, provide the first protocol that guarantees full privacy in account-based cryptocurrencies "

"The proposal under consideration builds on the SEC's Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, released on March 31, 2022, which requires SEC-reporting companies to account for crypto held by intermediaries for customer safeguarding as on-balance sheet assets and liabilities, rather than off-balance sheet. It penalizes the accounting for crypto custody relative to the accounting for securities custody. "

Visa published a paper that outlines how to write a smart contract application for a self-custodial wallet that could allow a user to setup a programmable payment instruction that can push funds automatically from one self-custodial wallet account to another at recurring intervals, without requiring the user's active participation each time.  This solution taps into a concept known as "Account Abstraction", a developer proposal currently being explored within the Ethereum ecosystem. The idea behind Account Abstraction is to make user accounts on Ethereum function more like smart contracts by allowing a user to have programmable features embedded into their wallets.

The European Central Bank (ECB) published a technical note on the potential impact of users holding multiple digital euro accounts. Under the European Commission's proposed digital euro regulations digital euro users would be able to hold multiple digital euro payment accounts with the same or different payment service providers (PSPs). This entails technical difficulties regarding the interplay of these accounts with the management of a consolidated holding limit. The analysis shows that it is technically feasible to provide users with multiple accounts in conjunction with an individual holding limit, but trade-offs would be necessary, mainly in terms of user experience as well as technical and operational implementation for PSPs.

PayPal -owned payments app Venmo announced support for instant transfers to U.S. bank accounts. The feature is an optional alternative to Venmo's standard bank transfer service, which typically takes one to three business days to process transactions. With Instant Transfer, however, funds from your Venmo account can hit your bank account within minutes.

There are several ways to streamline and universalize an American national payment system. One easy way would be to build on the existing network of TreasuryDirect accounts. Any citizen or legal resident of the U.S., including any business, can open a digital account with the Treasury through which to transact with it. Accounts take five minutes to open and begin using. All the country would need to add is peer-to-peer connectivity between accounts, and then allow dollars to flow over the network.

Fnality sees the new Bank of England omnibus accounts as supportive of the opportunity to use tokenized cash assets on next generation payment systems, enabling on-chain wholesale exchange of value. Fnality uses an Etheruem-based permissioned blockchain developed by Clearmatics, that will run on chain payment systems in multiple currencies with a regulated subsidiary in each jurisdiction. When a bank wants to use Fnality tokens to make a payment, it transfers money from its central bank account to the Fnality omnibus account, which then tokenizes it. The bank then uses the tokens to make a payment, and the recipient bank can then opt to convert the received tokens back to central bank money and have it transferred to its own central bank account. Or it could use the tokens for further payments.

This De Nederlansche Bank surveyed a representative panel of Dutch consumers to determine public preferences regarding central bank digital currency (CBDC) demand. It found that roughly half would open a CBDC current or savings account, suggesting that consumers perceive CBDC as distinct from current and savings accounts offered by traditional banks. Intended adoption is positively related to respondents' knowledge of CBDC and trust in banks and in the central bank, but the amount respondents want to deposit in the CBDC savings account depends on the interest rate offered. Furthermore, intended usage of the CBDC current account is highest among people who find privacy and security important and among consumers with low trust in banks in general.

The new MoCaFi Mobility Bank Account comes with the MoCaFi Mobility Debit Mastercard® which provides access no charge ATM withdrawals and options on how to load your funds. The MoCaFi Debit Card can be used at any of the 55,000 AllPoint Network ATMs to withdraw cash with no surcharge fee. The MoCaFi Debit Card is issued by Sunrise Banks N.A., Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard International Incorporated. The card may be used everywhere Debit Mastercard is accepted. A MoCaFi Bank Account can be opened in minutes with the MoCaFi app, available in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. When a MoCaFi account is opened, the customer immediately receives their account number and routing number for direct depositing approved payroll and government benefits checks.

SWIFT's Payment Pre-validation service that enables banks to verify payee account details before an international payment is sent, removing a key point of friction in cross-border transactions, went live. Most cross-border payments are processed without issue, but one of the leading causes for those that fail or lose time is incorrect beneficiary information - from misspelled names to transposed account numbers. And because they are detected late in the process, these issues can be among the most time-consuming and costly to resolve. SWIFT's Payment Pre-validation service tackles this problem by allowing a sending bank to confirm account details, via an API, with the receiving bank from the very beginning of the process so that any data or account problems are identified right up front.

In many countries, the gender gap is lower with mobile money than with traditional financial services and mobile money is helping with closing the gender gap[25]. Globally, 65% of women have an account compared with 72% of men. This means that women are 10% less likely than men to have a financial account. This number reaches 24% in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. However, in many, the gender gap in mobile money account ownership is lower than the gender gap in bank account ownership.

Classifications can be a powerful tool to organize and communicate ideas. The main allure of distinguishing between account-based and token-based is to highlight a defining feature of certain new, emerging forms of digital currency. But if a digital currency can be both token-based and account-based, then the classification loses its power to meaningfully distinguish between new and existing methods of digital payments. Furthermore, it may slow down progress in understanding intrinsic differences between the growing set of digital payment options and technologies. Future classifications could modify the definitions of the terms account-based and token-based to more clearly distinguish them. In the meantime, perhaps these terms should be retired to avoid further confusion.