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"We argue that an account-based design cannot meet the ECB's stated design goals and that the ECB needs to fundamentally change its mindset when thinking about its role in the context of the Digital Euro if it wants the project to succeed. Along the same lines, the French National Council for Digitalization published a report on "Notes and Tokens, The New Competition of Currencies" [DGTV21]. Here, the authors make related incorrect claims about inevitable properties of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), going as far as stating that a CBDC is not possible without an eID system. Our paper sets the record straight."

The Leibniz Institute for Financial Research Sustainable Architecture for Finance in Europe (SAFE) published a paper that concludes that the risks and imponderables do not favor the launch of a digital euro if that decision had to be made now.  However, there may be future circumstances in which having a CBDC ready for use may be useful. For example, there could be an unexpected collapse in the availability of banknotes or sudden switches in consumer preferences towards payment instruments which current infrastructures cannot easily handle with the available technologies. Or we could experience phases of financial instability requiring the central bank to back up the private sector in order to preserve the functionality of the payment system. Or, there could be strategic security conditions necessitating more state-driven payment infrastructures. All these are unlikely scenarios, but not impossible ones, which would lead to the need for central banks to step in, perhaps in a short time. Therefore, preparing is a good thing, even if the odds of its usefulness in normal conditions are slim. https://safe-frankfurt.de/publications/pub-details-startseite/publicationname/the-digital-euro-a-precautionary-device-not-a-deus-ex-machina.html

"A central bank orchestrated payment system without system-specific payment assets meets most of the central banks' reasons for issuing CBDCs. It provides monetary and strategic autonomy for a critical infrastructure and meets user demand for digital payment solutions. As the example of Pix shows, such a system can compete successfully with existing and new payment services."

An article by a couple of Banco de España economists proposes a framework to assess how reliable machine learning (ML) technology is to credit assessments. It is based on generating datasets intended to resemble typical credit settings, in which the relationship between the variables is defined. It uses non-interpretable ML models on these generated datasets, and explain their results using two popular interpretability techniques. It then calculates to what extent the explanations given by the interpretability techniques match the underlying truth. 

"In this paper, we show that approaches based on this type of CBDC design are unlikely to satisfy user demand. We argue that it is more important to focus on the payment system. Drawing on the experiences in Brazil (Pix) and Switzerland (Twint), we show that successful payment systems do not require users to hold system-specific payment assets, making them convenient and accessible. An important motive for the ECB to develop a digital euro is to preserve monetary sovereignty and strategic autonomy. A European payment system could ensure autonomy over such a critical infrastructure of an economy. For it to succeed, the ECB should look to and learn from the best examples."

"This policy note takes stock of the advances in research on CBDCs, looking at their implications for both financial stability and monetary policy.3 And it discusses areas where we can further expand the frontiers of our knowledge on this topic."