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The Bank of Canada published a paper that examines the optimal amount of user anonymity in a CBDC in the context of bank lending. Anonymity, defined as the lender's inability to discern an entrepreneur's actions that enable fund diversion, influences the choice of payment instrument due to its impact on a bank's lending decisions. The paper shows that moderate anonymity in CBDC leads to an inefficient pooling equilibrium. To avoid this, CBDC anonymity should be either low, reducing attractiveness, or high, discouraging bank lending. Specifically, the anonymity should be high when CBDC significantly benefits sales, and low otherwise. However, competition between deposits and CBDC may hinder the implementation of low anonymity.

A recent ECB paper describe a hypothetical payments system in which citizens are provided with a monthly allotment of 'anonymity vouchers'. The vouchers expire and cannot be traded. If users wish to make an anonymous payment, they must attach a voucher to each payment request. By doing so neither the issuing central bank nor the anti-money laundering authorities will be privy to the payor's identity. Once the allotment is used up, payments can no longer anonymous. By rationing anonymity, the authors of the paper hope to allow for lower-value anonymous payments while filtering out larger ones.

Any type of money that requires a ledger, be it centralised or distributed, does not provide anonymity to the user.  Even if the ledger does not require a user's identity, it will record the transactions of the user that can be used to track him or her down.  This was seen in the case of bitcoin and the Silk Road darknet website, which was shut down by US federal agents in 2013.  And current CBDCs, as in China and the Bahamas, make no claim of full anonymity in transactions.  So, is anonymity even possible with a CBDC?

Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous; transactions can be traced and centralized exchanges hold know-your-customer (KYC) information. For security reasons, some users prefer to maintain anonymity, for example to protect against exchange hacks that expose KYC information. Options for buying and using Bitcoin anonymously include peer-to-peer exchanges, Bitcoin ATMs and dark web tumbler services.

A CBDC could be designed so that anyone can get as much anonymous money as they want. But they'd have to pay for this privilege. One way is by charging a hourly fee, or a negative interest rate, on anonymous balances or set a large withdrawal fee, say 5% for anomymity. These revenues might be used by the government to to bolster the budgets of fraud departments, or to compensate victims of ransomware. But an anonymity tax puts regular people and criminals into the same bucket and it subtly ostracizes licit users of anonymous CBDC.

Mu Changchun, the Director General of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), clarified how the managed anonymity of China's digital yuan works. Wallets come in multiple tiers, with small transaction value tiers supporting anonymity by requiring only a phone number as identity, but larger-value tiers requiring conventional proof of identity. Under China's Personal Information Protection Law, the telecom companies cannot release identity information to any third parties, including the central bank. However, if it's suspected that some anonymous transactions are illicit, law enforcement agencies can present a legal warrant to the phone company to get the user's identity. Also, all wallets have a sub wallet function in which each merchant can have a separate wallet to avoid linking a person across merchants.

"Jürgen Schaaf stressed the importance of privacy (ranked first in the consultation on the digital euro by European citizens) and discussed different privacy options the ECB has analyzed. These options range from full anonymity to fully transparent payments to the central bank. It was argued that full anonymity will, as a preliminary view, not be a viable option as it conflicts with regulation around anti-money laundering. Nevertheless, and as stressed by some participants, since there is no CBDC regulation in place, an anonymous CBDC would not necessarily be against compliance. During the meeting, a survey about privacy was conducted amongst attendees and revealed that 50% of  participants were in favor of selective privacy, which means higher privacy for low-value transactions, an approach that has already been seen as technically feasible. 33% of the participants voted for anonymity, and 0% (!!) voted for payment transparency to an intermediary or fully transparent to the central bank. "

The majority of the European Union (EU) Parliament's lead committees have approved new legislative to ban anonymous crypto payments. This comprehensive package of anti-money laundering measures also includes significant restrictions on cash transactions. Anonymous cash payments in commercial transactions are limited to amounts under €3,000, with a complete prohibition on cash transactions exceeding €10,000 in business contexts. Also any crypto transaction via "hosted wallets" (i.e., managed by service providers) must be fully traceable, eliminating anonymity for even the smallest transactions.

The RBI has said the central bank digital currency (CBDC) will remain anonymous and regulations that are applicable to paper currency will prevail on the e-rupee. RBI deputy-governor T. Rabi Sankar said the central bank was looking at solutions to make CBDC at par with paper currency when it comes to having the key feature of anonymity which has ensured that cash is still used in the developed world. ``The challenge is to ensure the anonymity because the normal understanding is that anything digital leaves a footprint. This can have various solutions," Sankar said. The RBI is looking at a technological solution and also a legal solution to help assuage the concerns on this problem. Sankar said the start-up or the fintech ecosystem would have to innovate and launch various use cases for the new currency. RBI governor Shaktikanta Das said the rules governing deposits and withdrawal of paper cash will also apply to digital currency.

The head of the People's Bank of China's Digital Currency Research Institute, Mu Changchun, said that "controllable anonymity" remains at the core of China's digital yuan design. That is, privacy will only apply to end users when they transact among themselves while the details of those transactions remain visible to the central bank and regulators. He also has said a "completely anonymous central bank digital currency (CBDC) is not an option" based on international consensus. Any design that doesn't satisfy anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism financing and anti-tax evasion purposes will be simply vetoed. https://news.stcn.com/sd/202103/t20210321_2933464.html

The European Central Bank's recent report exploring the idea of issuing a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) claims that "regulations do not allow anonymity in electronic payments and the digital euro must in principle comply with such regulations". In fact, the Fifth EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AML5) exempts issuers of e-money/prepaid cards from collecting customer information if user holdings do not exceed EUR50 (EUR150 for non-rechargeable stored value cards). Why did the EU build an anonymity exemption into payments law but now chooses to avoid exploiting it in potential CBDC designs?

"Physical cash should be the standard for evaluating how to strike a balance between ensuring privacy and adhering to anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CTF) rules. At a minimum, this implies allowing real anonymity and transaction privacy for daily life transactions up to limits that are similar to the current limits for cash. In addition to full anonymity for low-value transactions, a high level of pseudo-anonymity should be provided for all larger transactions to ensure a high level of identity protection."

European lawmakers have adopted legislation imposing a €1,000 cap on anonymous cryptocurrency transactions, as part of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) package. The draft bill also seeks to cap anonymous cash transactions above €7,000 when it is not possible to identify the sender. The bill had an overwhelming majority of 99 votes in favor, eight against and six abstentions. The European parliament will start negotiations on the final text of the AML/CFT package after a plenary session in April. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20230327IPR78511/new-eu-measures-against-money-laundering-and-terrorist-financing

The wallet with the weakest know-your customer (KYC) strength is an anonymous wallet, which can be opened with only a mobile phone number. Such wallets, which can be opened with just a mobile phone numbers are completely anonymous to the PBOC and various operating agencies. However, this type of wallet will the lowest balance and daily transaction limit, which can only meet the daily needs of small payments. To make large payments , the wallet needs to be upgraded, and the wallet balance and payment limit will increase as the KYC intensity increases.

The People's Bank of China (PBOC) revealed the holding and transaction limit structures being applied to the wallets currently being used in its eCNY central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilots. There are anonymous wallets that can be registered with only a mobile phone number, with maximum holding limits of 10,000 yuan, single transaction limits of 2,000 yuan, and daily cumulative payment limits of 5,000 yuan. And then there are less anonymous wallets with holding limits of 500,000 yuan, single transaction limits of 50,0000 yuan, and daily cumulative payment limits of 100,000 yuan, requiring that the users link the wallets to a bank account and meet full know-your-customer (KYC) requirements. Also users can open sub-wallets to limit payments, set up conditional payments, and control information sharing. https://finance.sina.com.cn/meeting/2021-06-11/doc-ikqciyzi9071612.shtml

The European Commission is proposing to prohibit cash transactions higher than EUR10,000 and ban anonymous crypto-asset wallets, saying that crypto-assets should be governed by the same rules as regular bank wire transfers. The proposed rules would also oblige financial institutions that facilitate crypto-asset transfers to collect various personal data of senders and recipients, essentially expanding the so-called Financial Action Task Force (FATF) "travel rule" to crypto-asset transactions.

On Tuesday, besides prohibiting anonymous crypto transactions, the EU's executive arm also added anonymous crypto asset wallets to its prohibition list, requiring the full application of AML/CFT rules to ensure complete traceability. This created some confusion as to what exactly the crypto wallets meant here, which the European Commission confirmed is not applicable to non-custodial privacy wallets rather only to exchanges. Indeed, open-source, non-custodial wallets, will not be covered by the prohibition.

The PBOC's imminent CBDC is going to have a feature called controllable anonymity. None of the news articles have made much of an effort to explain What that means. But we've actually known about this feature for quite some time. Back in 2018, the project's head, Yao Qian, provided a short description of it. It's not as Orwellian as it seems.

Planning to score some cocaine before meeting your girlfriend at a hotel? Neither the cops nor your wife will be any the wiser if you use some of the "anonymity vouchers" Europe's central bank just proposed building them into an e-euro.

Certain crypto assets, which are often referred to as privacy coins, private coins or anonymous coins, attempt to hide information about transactions, giving users more privacy. A number of possible methods exist for adding privacy to Bitcoin, including peer-to-peer trading, although multiple crypto assets focus on privacy more directly via their technology. Some familiar privacy assets in the crypto space include Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), Verge (XVG), Beam and Grin. Dash also makes it on the list, as it allows for added anonymity, although the coin is not technically classified as a privacy asset.