Cashless Economy
A cashless economy relies mainly on electronic payments rather than notes and coins, creating efficiency, access, privacy, fraud, and resilience tradeoffs.
Financial-technology terms for digital money, virtual currency, electronic money, and distributed-ledger infrastructure.
Digital money and ledger technology terms describe monetary value, payment records, and transfer systems that exist in electronic form rather than as physical cash. This branch covers digital money, digital currency, virtual currency, cashless-economy concepts, and distributed ledger technology.
Use these pages when a payment, stored balance, wallet record, ledger entry, tokenized asset, or settlement workflow depends on the form of money and the system that records it. The practical issue is usually transferability, custody, redemption, settlement evidence, price volatility, operational risk, or legal classification.
| Term | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Digital Money | Monetary value stored, transferred, or settled through electronic systems. |
| Digital Currency | Bank deposits, e-money, CBDCs, stablecoins, crypto assets, and platform value compared through issuer, claim, redemption, settlement, and protection. |
| Virtual Currency | Convertible, closed-loop, centralized, and decentralized value analyzed through issuer, ledger, custody, redemption, and transaction evidence. |
| Cashless Economy | Financial systems where cards, transfers, wallets, and digital records displace most cash use. |
| Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) | Shared ledger architecture analyzed through permissions, validation, governance, finality, settlement, custody, and reconciliation. |
Start with what the value represents. A bank balance, prepaid balance, wallet balance, stablecoin, virtual currency, and distributed-ledger record can all be digital, but they may have different issuers, redemption rights, transfer rules, custody arrangements, and risk exposures.
Choose a subsection first. Deeper term pages live inside each subsection, which keeps large topic hubs readable.
A cashless economy relies mainly on electronic payments rather than notes and coins, creating efficiency, access, privacy, fraud, and resilience tradeoffs.
Digital currency is money or money-like value recorded electronically. Compare bank deposits, e-money, CBDCs, stablecoins, and crypto assets.
Digital money is monetary value stored, transferred, or settled electronically through bank systems, wallets, cards, payment apps, or digital ledgers.
Distributed ledger technology lets multiple participants maintain a shared transaction record. Learn how DLT works, where it helps, and its financial risks.
Virtual currency is a digital representation of value used within a network or platform. Compare convertible, closed-loop, centralized, and decentralized forms.