On the Operational Resilience of CBDC: Threats and Prospects of Formal Validation for Offline Payments

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Hauptverfasser: Bernardo, Marco, Calandra, Federico, Esposito, Andrea, Fabris, Francesco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Bernardo, Marco
Calandra, Federico
Esposito, Andrea
Fabris, Francesco
author_facet Bernardo, Marco
Calandra, Federico
Esposito, Andrea
Fabris, Francesco
contents Information and communication technologies are by now employed in most human activities, including economics and finance. Modern computers have reached an extraordinary power in terms of information processing, storage, retrieval, and transmission. However, several results of theoretical computer science imply the impossibility of certifying software quality in general. With the exception of safety-critical systems, this has primarily concerned information processed by confined systems, with limited socio-economic consequences. In the emerging era of technologies for exchanging tokenized assets and digital money over the Internet, such as in particular central bank digital currency (CBDC), even a minor bug could trigger a financial collapse. Although the aforementioned impossibility results cannot be overcome in an absolute sense, there exist formal methods that can provide correctness assertions for software system models under suitable conditions. We advocate their use to validate the operational resilience of software infrastructures enabling CBDC, with special emphasis on offline payments as they constitute a very critical issue.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08064
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Operational Resilience of CBDC: Threats and Prospects of Formal Validation for Offline Payments
Bernardo, Marco
Calandra, Federico
Esposito, Andrea
Fabris, Francesco
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Information and communication technologies are by now employed in most human activities, including economics and finance. Modern computers have reached an extraordinary power in terms of information processing, storage, retrieval, and transmission. However, several results of theoretical computer science imply the impossibility of certifying software quality in general. With the exception of safety-critical systems, this has primarily concerned information processed by confined systems, with limited socio-economic consequences. In the emerging era of technologies for exchanging tokenized assets and digital money over the Internet, such as in particular central bank digital currency (CBDC), even a minor bug could trigger a financial collapse. Although the aforementioned impossibility results cannot be overcome in an absolute sense, there exist formal methods that can provide correctness assertions for software system models under suitable conditions. We advocate their use to validate the operational resilience of software infrastructures enabling CBDC, with special emphasis on offline payments as they constitute a very critical issue.
title On the Operational Resilience of CBDC: Threats and Prospects of Formal Validation for Offline Payments
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08064