Programmable money is digital money whose units carry conditions on their use, such as restrictions on eligible goods, recipients, locations, or time periods.
IMF legal analysis uses programmable money to describe digital money encoded with conditions on its use. Those conditions attach to the money itself and can constrain how the holder may spend or transfer it. Programmable payments operate differently: software executes a payment when predefined conditions are met while the underlying money retains its ordinary characteristics. The distinction has implications for fungibility, property rights, user autonomy, and monetary uniformity.
Conditions embedded in the monetary units constitute money-level programmability. Conditions applied to the payment instruction or service constitute programmable payments.
Money-level restrictions can affect fungibility and user rights. Peer-reviewed research also examines how differentiated programmability can affect the uniformity and liquidity of digital currencies.
Digital money that can only be spent on specified goods is programmable money. An automatic payment released after delivery uses programmable payment logic without imposing the same restriction on the monetary units.