World Economic Forum elevates digital-currency governance at Davos
At Davos, the World Economic Forum launched a Global Consortium for Digital Currency Governance, placing digital money—including the policy questions raised by private cryptocurrencies and stablecoins—inside a formal public-private governance initiative.
On January 24, 2020, the World Economic Forum announced the Global Consortium for Digital Currency Governance during its annual meeting in Davos. The initiative was intended to develop policy approaches for digital currencies and stablecoins with participation from central banks, governments, international organizations, companies and technical experts.
The announcement followed the Forum’s release of a central-bank digital-currency policy toolkit earlier that week. Together, the initiatives showed that questions once discussed mainly inside cryptocurrency communities—digital money, settlement design, privacy, interoperability and monetary sovereignty—had moved into a global policy venue.
Bitcoin was not the consortium’s sole focus, and the Forum did not endorse Bitcoin. Its historical relevance is contextual: the institutions gathered at Davos were beginning to build governance frameworks around a category of digital money that had been forced onto the policy agenda by Bitcoin, stablecoins and projects such as Libra.