Chiara Scotti: Digital money and the architecture of trust

Welcome address by Ms Chiara Scotti, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, at a workshop "Digital assets and monetary policy transmission", organised by the Bank of Italy, European Central Bank, Euro Area Business Cycle Network and Centre for Economic Policy Research, Rome, 4 May 2026.

Central bank speech  | 
05 May 2026
by Chiara Scotti
PDF full text
(278kb)
  |  13 pages

Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues,

It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to Banca d'Italia for this workshop on 'Digital Assets and Monetary Policy Transmission', co-organized with the European Central Bank, the Euro Area Business Cycle Network and CEPR.

I am especially pleased that we will begin with Hélène Rey's keynote on the internationalization of currencies and crypto-assets. That is an ideal starting point, because digital assets immediately raise cross-border questions: about currency competition, capital flows, and the international monetary system.

But whether money circulates domestically or internationally, one question remains fundamental: what gives it acceptance in the first place? A sixteenth-century Maltese coin bears the inscription Non aes, sed fides - not the metal, but trust.

The history of money repeatedly teaches us that acceptance has never rested on its intrinsic value alone. Even when currencies seemed to derive their worth from precious metal, agricultural goods, or other commodities, what truly sustained their use was trust: trust in value, in convertibility, in broad acceptance, and in the institutions standing behind them.

That lesson is even more important today. As money becomes increasingly digital - an electronic signal with no physical substance representing an entry in a database, or a token on a distributed ledger - it is tempting to focus on what new technology can enable: speed, programmability, efficiency, or new forms of settlement. But these are attributes of the payment instrument or of its underlying infrastructure, not the source of its value. What makes something money has not changed: it is accepted because it is trusted, and it is trusted because credible institutions and rules stand behind it.

The central question, therefore, is not whether central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins or tokenized deposits can each, individually, perform the role that traditional forms of money have historically played. The more relevant question is what kind of institutional architecture - combining different settlement assets, institutions and infrastructures - can deliver trust, resilience and effective monetary control while at the same time accompanying innovation, without hindering it.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect those of the BIS.