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The Banca d'Italia published a paper that, based on data from a 2019 ECB survey of consumers, studies the determinants of Italian consumers' payment choices at the physical point of sale (POS). The study also assesses the reasons why consumers mainly use cash for their payments although they would prefer to use other instruments, such as cards. The acceptance of cashless instruments at the point of sale and the value of the transaction are the main factors influencing payment choice. Men and residents in Northern and Central Italy pay with cards more than women and residents in Southern Italy, but these gaps narrow among people with digital skills. Consumers pay in cash, even though they would prefer to use a different payment instrument, due to a lack of acceptance of cashless instruments by merchants.

The BIS Innovation Hub Singapore Centre and partners successfully connected the test versions of three established instant payment systems (IPS) using the Nexus model. The next phase of the project will work on the real-world potential of a multilateral network that could be scaled up across more countries. The year-long collaboration included the Bank of Italy, Central Bank of Malaysia (BNM) and Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). Test payments were initiated using only the mobile phone numbers or the recipients' company registration numbers via the Eurosystem's TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS), Malaysia's Real-time Retail Payments Platform (RPP) and Singapore's Fast and Secure Transfers (FAST) payment system. For the next phase of the project Bank Indonesia, BNM, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, MAS and the Bank of Thailand will leverage experiences from Phase I and Phase II of the project towards connecting their countries' IPS and facilitate cross-border transactions across a combined population of about 500 million people. Looking ahead, the BIS and the five central banks envisage that Nexus could eventually be implemented globally. To achieve this, they will aim to establish a Global Advisory Panel of central banks and payment system operators to advise on the project's development beyond the Southeast Asian region. The Bank of Italy and the European Central Bank will be invited to join this panel.

The Bank of Italy published a paper on the challenges crypto-asset regulation faces, as well as the drivers of the most recent regulatory developments, highlighting remaining open issues. It warns that conventional regulatory approaches that rely on entity-based rules will leave some gaps. For example, they may not fully address decentralized finance (DeFi) activities because of their non-traditional legal entity structures, decentralized governance, smart-contracts, and the anonymity of persons in charge. The report calls for an approach based on the combination of legislation and soft regulation, with the advantages of flexibility, dynamism, and pragmatism. 

European Libra users will have to treat their Libra holdings as an asset for capital gains tax purposes - and for the UK, HMRC confirms that, as a basket of currencies, Libra doesn't qualify as a currency itself. "The problem would potentially be even more serious with no annual capital gains exemption in France, Italy or Spain and a much smaller €600 limit in Germany."

The Coinbase Card will be available in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland and the Netherlands. The card allows users with Coinbase accounts to spend cryptocurrencies in stores and online at any merchant that accepts Visa.

Coinbase has launched its Visa debit card in six European countries. Cardholders in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland and the Netherlands will be able to use the cards, which sync directly to their Coinbase accounts.

Binance will wind down its futures and derivatives products offerings in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. With immediate effect, users from these countries will not be able to open new futures or derivatives products accounts. With effect from a later date to be announced in a further notice, users from these countries will have 90 days to close their open positions.

The Singapore Centre of the BIS Innovation Hub (BISIH) announced that it will start a proof-of-concept of its Project Nexus cross-border payments platform with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Bank of Italy and the Central Bank of Malaysia, as well as with BCS in Singapore and PayNet in Malaysia. Project Nexus aims to enable and speed up the process of linking fast payment systems by standardizing the way that these systems connect to each other. Rather than a payment system operator building custom connections for every new country that it connects to, the operator can make one connection to the Nexus platform. This single connection allows a fast payments system to reach all other countries in the network. This provides a more scalable way to build up instant cross-border payment networks.

"More than 2,100 computers around the world were infected over the weekend with ransomware that exploited a two-year-old vulnerability in server software made by VMware Inc., according to cybersecurity researchers and authorities."

Binance said it will leave the Netherlands after the company's application to register under the Dutch crypto authorization regime was rejected. Under the current regulatory regime, Binance can only get approval to operate in an European Union (EU) country by registering under its money laundering prevention rules. The firm has so far received such approvals in France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden and Lithuania. This may change once the EU's Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation comes into force at the end of June 2023.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has launched a survey targeting potential participants in its trials and experiments for central bank money settlement of wholesale financial transactions recorded on distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms. The plan is to test three settlement solutions, including two that link to existing euro payment systems (from the central banks of Germany and Italy) and one wholesale CBDC developed by the Banque de France. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/intro/news/ecb.dedocs231013_annex.en.pdf

"Layer-1 blockchain platform Algorand has been chosen as the public blockchain to support an "innovative digital guarantees platform" to be used in Italy's banking and insurance markets."

The European Central Bank (ECB) published the list of the first institutions to participate in its trials of the settlement of wholesale transactions on distributed ledger technology (DLT) based platforms using central bank money. The list is comprised of five central banks, ten institutions, six market DLT operators and five central banks. The trials will involve real transactions as well as mock simulations, with most of the tests focusing on securities settlement. There also plans to consider use cases for payment versus payment (FX) and cross border payment. Three settlement solutions are part of the trials, provided by the central banks of Germany (RTGS-based "trigger" solution), France (wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) solution) and Italy (TIPS Hashlink solution). https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/intro/news/html/ecb.mipnews240403.en.html

Clearstream, Deutsche Börse Group's post-trade business, joins the European Central Bank (ECB) trials and experiments, aimed at exploring the potential of distributed-ledger technology (DLT) for wholesale central bank money settlement. Clearstream aims to assess the feasibility of using DLT for wholesale transaction processing, using tokenized securities, including conducting euro-denominated issuance and delivery-versus-payment (DvP) transactions across different use-cases and payment models. Three solutions will be tested by the central banks of Germany (Trigger solution), France (wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC)) and Italy (TIPS Hashlink).

The Italian Banking Association has announced that Italy's banks will integrate distributed ledger technology into internal processes to boost settlements. The deployment of blockchain is also set to improve transparency in transactions between banks and efficiency of communication between counterparties.

And speaking of Banca d'Italia, according to ThePaypers, Associazione Bancaria Italiana (ABI) has brought together 18 commercial banks to collaborate with the central bank in a CBDC pilot. In this Project Leonidas the banks use a shared private ledger to streamline interbank payments using a pretend DLT-based wholesale CBDC. This sounds very similar to the ABI's Project Punta, a DLT-based platform now in production that  is used to settle small interbank transactions, with Project Leonidas being a scaled up version to handle large interbank transactions. However, it doesn't seem to actually be CBDC-based, even though it's been accepted into the Banca d'Italia's Milano Hub innovation facilitator. In other words, the "wholesale CBDC" used is not tokenized CeBM.

Banca d'Italia published a paper in July 2003 that uses a theoretical model to study how the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) by a systemic economy can affect the choices of residents in a small open economy. It finds that an increase in the preference for the foreign CBDC induces a banking crisis and has a negative impact on GDP, the greater the more the foreign CBDC is perceived as deposit-like. Public authorities can mitigate these effects with multiple tools: by taxing the CBDC, by easing macroprudential requirements, or through FX interventions. A higher stock of foreign CBDC held by households can shield the small economy from an increase in the interest rate on external debt, if the remuneration of the CBDC remains constant.

The Italian Banking Association (ABI) published the results of its Project Leonidas (Liquidation Effective ONchaIn Dlt Asset on Check) distributed ledger technology (DLT) based wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) proof of concept (POC) work. The project, which concluded at the end of 2023, was carried out under the Banca d'Italia Milano Hub innovation center. It investigated the benefits of using DLT-based wholesale CBDC for interbank transactions, so that the capacity, efficiency and robustness requirements of central bank systems are met.