Strategic Digitization in Currency and Payment Competition

The authors are especially grateful to Toni Whited (the editor), an anonymous referee, Jean Charles Rochet, Darrell Duffie, Rod Garratt, and Harald Uhlig for detailed comments. They also thank Viral Acharya, Toni Ahnert, Kathrin Assenmacher, Ravi Bansal, Alexander Bechtel, Morten Bech, Bruno Biais, Markus Brunnermeier, Qing Chang, Jonathan Chiu, Doug Diamond, Egemen Eren, Eugene Fama, Wenxin Du, Matthias Guennewig, Sebastian Gryglewicz, Benjamin Hebert, Zhiguo He, Zhiheng He, Zhengyang Jiang, Charles Kahn, Anil Kashyap, Todd Keister, Ralph Koijen, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Vera Lubbersen, Wenhao Li, Matteo Maggiori, Stefan Nagel, Lubos Pastor, Eswar Prasad, Adriano Rampini, Raghuram Rajan, Qihong Ruan, Fahad Saleh, Linda Schilling, Amir Sufi, Katrin Tinn, Jordan Velte, Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj, Quentin Vandeweyer, Alex Vardoulakis, Elu von Thadden, Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Russell Wong, Zhuo Zhong, Shengxing Zhang, as well as seminar and conference participants at Amino Capital Annual End-of-Year Conference (Oahu, 2021), Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research, American Finance Association Annual Meeting 2023, Chicago Booth, Banque de France, Cesifo Macro Conference, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance Conference, China Fintech Research Conference (CFTRC2022), CEPR Political Economy in Central Banking Conference, Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research (CBER) Symposium, ECB Money Market Conference, Fed Board, Future(s) of Money – Paris Workshop, the Gilmore Centre Conference on Financial Technology (Warwick Business School), the Inaugural Digital Finance Forefront Research Conference, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Summer Institute 2022, Northern Finance Association Annual Meeting 2022, The Oxford Said and Risk Center at ETH Zurich Macro-finance Conference, the Pennsylvania State University Smeal College of Business, the SKEMA-ESSEC FinTech conference, and Virtual Seminar Series on Central Banking & Digital Currencies for helpful discussions and feedback. Cong acknowledges the Ripple University Blockchain Research initiative for financial support. A previous paper version has been circulated under the title “The Coming Battle of Digital Currencies.” The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.