Money or Credit, Operationalised: A Comment on Digital Money (The Future of Banking 8)

Is a digital euro-claim that promises to be worth one euro a new kind of money, or a new kind of bank? And does the answer depend on who issues it? Digital Money, the eighth Future of Banking report (Cecchetti, Niepelt, Rey and Vives, CEPR Press / IESE, 2026), gives the right answer to the first question and most of the right answer to the second. It treats digital money as a question of monetary architecture rather than technology, judges instruments by the institutions that stand behind them, likens stablecoins to money-market funds, and concludes that tokenised bank deposits are the better-positioned form of private digital money. This comment agrees, and is offered in that spirit. It adds five refinements from two vantage points the report, working globally and at the level of principle, had less room to develop: the operational detail of the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), and the economic history of offshore money. First, the report's verdict that "MiCA provides no central-bank backstop" is true of only half the regime, because the issuer is the fork. Second, the three-country comparison gains from an organising principle, a trilemma between par stability, private credit and the absence of a backstop. Third, "functional equivalence" is necessary but not sufficient, because the legal category still governs which risks supervisors are told to watch. Fourth, the report passes over a concrete consumer-protection gap that its own conclusion implies. Fifth, "no backstop" is, at systemic scale, an illusion, and saying so sharpens the report's strongest point into a clean policy choice. Two of the five are external to the report: the bank/non-bank split inside MiCA's own e-money-token category, and a deposit-guarantee gap that reaches even bank-issued tokens. The other three reformulate the report's own logic rather than contest it.