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Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Digital Payments: Mapping the Landscape (Auer, Böhme, Clark, Demirag 2025)

Last modified: 2026-10-27
URL: https://www.bis.org/publ/work1242.htm

Summary

BIS Working Paper 1242 that maps privacy-enhancing technologies for digital payments along two axes, privacy versus auditability and institution-based versus technology-based protection, and weighs the interests of users, data holders and law enforcement. It finds modern zero-knowledge proofs promising for combining strong privacy with rule-based limited transparency, but notes current limits in security and computational capacity. The same privacy/accountability trade-offs arise for e-ID systems.