An Ontological Exploration of Central Bank Digital Currency Governance Design

Financial ecosystems and their related transactions are increasingly relying on big tech payment service providers, such as ApplePay and WeChat. By offering these services, transacting in unregulated cryptocurrencies becomes easier. Consequently, big tech companies take a powerful position in the ecosystem, such dominance may be avoided by a decentralized ecosystem, in which decision making power is distributed over several actors. Emergence of several highly unregulated cryptocurrencies and increased reliance on big tech, motivates central banks to investigate alternatives, called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that can be subject to governance and rules. CBDC is specifically aimed to decrease dependency on largely uncontrolled big tech payment service providers and to limit the growth of unregulated cryptocurrencies. In this paper, we explore the key question of how to design a governance structure, we do that by applying the DECENT ontology and conceptual models to the real world use-case of CBDC.