Central Bank Digital Currency: A Multivocal Literature Review

Abstract

Purpose Several terms are interchangeably employed by researchers and practitioners to refer to central bank digital currency (CBDC), resulting in potential mistakes in the CBDC description. This study aims to survey the conceptualization of the CBDC and its utilization context to propose a list of CBDC terminologies. Design/methodology/approach The research method used is the multivocal literature review, which covers the state-of-the-art with scientific papers and state-of-the-practice with practitioners' reports of the CBDC terminology. Findings The finding reveals that the terminologies used to mention a digital currency (DC) issued by a central bank are digital money, official DC, DC, centrally banked cryptocurrencies, digital cash, digital central bank money, CBDCs, central bank-issued cryptocurrency, central bank cryptocurrency, digital fiat currency, central bank-issued digital cash and sovereign digital currencies. The authors who proposed CBDC with distributed ledger technology-based infrastructure named it central bank cryptocurrency, and the others who didn’t specify clearly the infrastructure called it CBDC or another synonym of the DC. Originality/value We propose a CBDC concept map to clarify the CBDC understanding, which lists all terminologies found in the literature in a logical structure. The proposed CBDC concept map elucidates the linguistic landscape and clarifies the interpretation nuances across different CBDC terminologies, provides a comprehensive blueprint of the multi-conceptualization nature of CBDCs and contributes with an accessible tool for economists, technologists and lawyer researchers.