Cambridge University’s digital asset education tool launched

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge has launched its Cambridge Digital Money Dashboard, which aims to provide interactive visual representations of up-to-date data on stablecoins, central bank digital currencies, tokenised bank deposits and crypto assets. The first phase of the dashboard focuses on the 10 major US dollar-pegged stablecoins, and targets regulators, supervisors and policy-makers.

The CDMD is offered as a platform that brings together relevant digital asset adoption and risk indicators, allowing for multi-stakeholder uses and comparison. It aims to offer policy-makers, financial authorities, academics, industry and the general public access to reliable information and analytical tools for thorough and insightful decision making.

Founding collaborators on the dashboard include the Bank for International Settlements, Dubai International Finance Centre, Fidelity Investments, Mastercard and NatWest. 

Keith Bear, a fellow at the CCAF who also sits on the Bank of England CBDC technology forum and the investor trends and research committee at the European Securities and Markets Authority, said: “This dashboard is an open-access web tool, the main goal of which is to track the evolution of the emerging digital money instrument.”

The key group of beneficiaries of the new dashboard are regulators, supervisors and policymakers. “We believe it is important to provide all the stakeholders in the ecosystem with trusted information which can be a basis for informed decisions on policy-making,” said Roman Proskalovich, lead, emergent money systems at the CCAF. 

He says the dashboard also targets those members of the public who want to better understand the development of stablecoins and other digital money instruments, so the platform features detailed educational content. 

While Proskalovich does not believe the tool will lead to further acceleration in the growth in the stablecoin market, he said he believes “it could well be that there will be some major changes with stablecoins and how they’re used”.

In due course, the plan is for the open-access web tool to cover all emerging digital money instrument types, according to Proskalovich. “We plan to add CBDC tokenised bank deposits and crypto assets,” he said. “The main goal is to track the evolution of emerging digital money.”

CCAF is co-operating with a variety of data providers to achieve near-real-time data feeds. The dashboard has three sections, including digital money 101, which provides educational content on the nature of the monetary system, evolving and presentation mechanisms and digital money instruments. 

“The second section, adoption, is where data exploration starts,” said Proskalovich. This includes an option to zoom smaller stablecoins and to see an overview of the global cryptography ecosystem, he said. “For the first iteration we have the most important fundamental metrics that we start with that later on will be extended,” he added.

This section will be extended in future releases, for example with the addition of detailed information on stablecoin usage, including a wallets breakdown of the sectors where stablecoins are used, he said. 

The third section in this first release, called risks and protections, aims to cover the risk of price deviation. The dashboard’s price feed is based on 14 major exchanges and enables users to interactively check how often the price was falling, for example in a particular price range, said Proskalovich. 

“As stablecoins are not always stable, we believe it is very important to show different stabilisation mechanisms that are essentially helping them to achieve stability, as most major stablecoins are trying to do that with reserves that are backing stablecoins,” he said. “We provide extended information on this, for example, giving users an overview of the assets stablecoin issues have to back their stablecoins, with details about different asset categories and their share in a stablecoin reserve portfolio.” 

Bear said that despite his role on the BoE’s technology forum the aim of the dashboard is not deliberately supportive of the goal of CBDCs. “As an independent university research centre, we tend to focus on empirical evidence rather than conjecture in that respect,” he said. “We see the value of CBDCs, but we also see some of the concerns, privacy among them.” 

At the BoE CBDC technology forum his focus is on asking the right questions and ensuring all points are considered, rather than being an advocate for a CBDC, he said. “We recognise this is a very complex discussion with many points of view across the whole of the spectrum. But as far as the dashboard is concerned, we’re very keen to understand how these different forms of digital money will actually evolve,” he added.

The next release of the dashboard is expected in the third quarter of this year.