What is a CBDC?
A central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a digital version of a country's official currency, issued and backed directly by its central bank. It is government money in digital form, and it is intended to carry the same legal status as the physical notes and coins a central bank already issues.
Unlike cryptoassets such as Bitcoin (BTC), CBDCs are centralized, stable in value and usually legal tender. In most retail designs they are available to anyone with a compatible wallet or device.
Central banks are pursuing CBDCs to modernize payment systems, improve settlement infrastructure and keep public money available in a digital economy. Some designs target everyday retail use. Others are built for wholesale use by financial institutions and interbank settlement.
Countries are moving at very different speeds. Some have fully launched a CBDC, most remain in research or pilot stages and a handful of advanced economies have deprioritized it.
How do CBDCs work?
The technical model for a CBDC depends on a country’s policy goals and on factors like scalability, privacy, cybersecurity and compatibility with existing banking systems.
Some central banks are building CBDCs on distributed ledger technology (DLT), the same foundational concept as blockchain technology. Others are using conventional centralized databases. A CBDC does not have to run on a blockchain, and several of the largest projects do not.
Most CBDCs in development follow a two-tier model where a country’s central bank issues the digital currency, and commercial banks and authorized payment providers handle customer-facing services such as opening wallets, onboarding customers, building payment interfaces and verifying know your customer (KYC) information.
Unlike physical cash or a standard bank deposit, many CBDCs are programmable, in the sense that they can enforce rules or conditions at the transaction level. A CBDC can theoretically:
- Expire after a certain period
- Be restricted to specific types of purchases
- Automate tax collection or benefits distribution
- Enable conditional business-to-business settlement
Supporters argue that programmability makes payments faster, more efficient and easier to automate. Critics raise questions about government overreach, privacy and individual financial freedom.
Retail vs wholesale CBDCs
Retail CBDCs are designed for everyday use by the general public. They work as a digital equivalent of cash, held in a wallet on a phone and used to pay for goods, save or transfer money between individuals.
All three fully launched CBDCs are retail: the Sand Dollar in the Bahamas (launched October 2020), Nigeria's eNaira (October 2021) and Jamaica's JAM-DEX (2022). Retail CBDCs are typically positioned as a way to improve financial inclusion, modernize domestic payments and widen public access to central bank money without requiring a traditional bank account.
Wholesale CBDCs are designed for use between financial institutions rather than the general public. They support interbank settlement, cross-border payments, securities transactions and large-value financial activity.
Many of the most advanced CBDC projects are wholesale and cross-border. Project mBridge, which involves China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, is testing how tokenized money and wholesale CBDCs could reduce friction in cross-border settlement and cut reliance on correspondent banking.
A separate wholesale initiative, Project Agorá, brings together central banks representing the major reserve currencies, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England, alongside more than 40 private financial institutions. It has tested whether tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized central bank reserves can settle together across currencies, and is moving toward real-value testing.
Retail and whole CBDCs carry very different risk and compliance implications. Where retail CBDCs concentrate risk in consumer payments, wholesale CBDCs concentrate it in international settlement and sanctions exposure.
CBDCs vs cryptoassets vs stablecoins
Cryptoassets like Bitcoin run on decentralized blockchains with no central issuer or controlling authority. Their value is driven by market demand, speculation and sentiment, which makes them far more volatile than fiat currencies, stablecoins or CBDCs.
Stablecoins such as USD Coin and Tether are designed to hold a stable value, usually by pegging to the US dollar. They are usually built on public blockchains and issued by private companies rather than governments, and they enable fast, low-cost international payments without the price volatility of most cryptoassets. Their utility has driven stablecoin circulation into the hundreds of billions of dollars and attracted growing interest from financial institutions, payment providers and businesses.
CBDCs are the only form of digital money issued and backed directly by a central bank. Because they carry the backing of the national government, they are centralized and stable in value. Unlike stablecoins or cryptoassets, they are designed to operate inside a country's existing monetary and regulatory system.
| CBDCs | Cryptoassets | Stablecoins | |
| Issuer | Central bank | Decentralized or centralized network | Private company or consortium |
| Infrastructure | Centralized or DLT-based | Public blockchain | Usually public blockchain |
| Value stability | Stable | Often volatile | Stable through pegging to USD or a similar asset |
| Legal tender status | Usually yes | Usually no | Usually no |
| Backing | Sovereign currency and central bank | Market-driven | Reserves held by issuer |
Five approaches to CBDCs
CBDCs have no single global direction of travel. National positions fall into five broad approaches, and a country's approach tells you more about its CBDC than its place on a pilot timeline.
Statutory prohibition
The United States is the only G20 country that has banned the issuance of a CBDC, at least temporarily. On July 11, 2026, the president signed into law the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. While primarily focused on US housing, as part of the negotiations, legislators secured the inclusion of a ban on CBDCs by either the Federal Reserve or an intermediary through December 31, 2030.
Legislated public option
The European Central Bank is pursuing a digital euro that would give people a digital form of cash to use online, in stores or person to person, with offline functionality and cash-like privacy for offline payments.
Three things have to happen before a digital euro exists. EU legislation has to clear the European Parliament and the Council. A pilot has to run successfully. The ECB Governing Council has to take an issuance decision. None of these is automatic, which partly explains why the timeline has repeatedly moved.
EU officials have framed the digital euro as a way to reduce the bloc's reliance on non-EU payment providers and dollar-denominated stablecoins, and to strengthen the euro's international role.
Design phase without commitment
Several advanced economies have run substantial retail CBDC programs without committing to launch. The Bank of England and HM Treasury have the digital pound in a design phase, with no decision taken on whether to issue one. Any launch would require further public consultation and primary legislation, and the Bank has said the earliest issuance would come in the second half of the decade.
Canada, Australia and Norway have all deprioritized retail CBDCs. The common rationale is that private payment innovation, including tokenized deposits, faster payment rails and regulated stablecoins, may deliver similar outcomes inside existing regulatory frameworks.
Holding limits are central to the active programs in this group. Proposals have centered on roughly 10,000 to 20,000 pounds per person in the UK and around 3,000 euros in the euro area, in both cases to limit deposit flight from commercial banks.
State-led rollout
China's digital yuan, the e-CNY, is the largest CBDC project in the world and the clearest example of a CBDC deployed as an instrument of policy. The People's Bank of China treats it as part of a strategy to internationalize the renminbi and support a multipolar currency system.
Russia's digital ruble is the other example, and the more significant one for compliance teams. The Bank of Russia has made support mandatory for the country's largest banks and retailers on a staged timetable running from 2026 to 2028. In 2026, the European Union became the first jurisdiction to place a CBDC under sanctions, banning transactions involving the digital ruble and the ruble-linked token RUBx as part of its 20th sanctions package against Russia.
Financial inclusion
Emerging markets make up the large majority of active retail CBDC development, with financial inclusion the dominant stated motive. All three live CBDCs sit in this group, and all three have seen limited consumer uptake despite government backing and infrastructure investment. Nigeria's central bank has made repeated adjustments to the eNaira and brought in private-sector partners to improve the technology and incentivize use.
India's e-rupee is the clearest test of whether a CBDC can deliver public money at scale. The Reserve Bank of India is running around ten pilots routing welfare and subsidy payments through it. Retail circulation fell over the last reported year even as those pilots expanded, and uptake remains far below India's existing payment rails.
As advanced economies step back from retail CBDCs, emerging markets including Rwanda, Kazakhstan and Bolivia have accelerated development, explicitly in response to the spread of dollar-backed stablecoins. All eleven BRICS members are exploring a CBDC, and several are building cross-border wholesale systems.
Concerns and challenges with CBDCs
Privacy
Privacy is the most contested aspect of CBDCs. Digital banking already involves extensive transaction monitoring, disclosure requirements and identity verification, while cash is highly private.
CBDCs fall between those two models depending on design. Some systems could preserve meaningful transactional privacy. Others could give authorities more transaction data than they hold today.
Bank disintermediation
If consumers move significant balances out of commercial bank deposits and into CBDCs, banks lose their cheapest and most stable source of funding. Replacing it with wholesale borrowing costs more, which pushes up the price of credit.
The sharper risk is speed. Because a CBDC is a direct claim on the central bank with no credit risk, it gives depositors a frictionless route out of a bank under stress. Most designs manage both problems through holding caps and non-interest-bearing structures, which keep a CBDC useful for payments and unattractive as a place to store savings.
Cybersecurity and operational resilience
A national CBDC system becomes part of a country's critical financial infrastructure. That creates hard requirements around cybersecurity, uptime, fraud prevention and disaster recovery. An outage or successful attack would have consequences well beyond a single commercial bank breach.
Adoption
Launched CBDCs have consistently underperformed adoption expectations. Public indifference, rather than technical failure, has been the main constraint in every live deployment so far.
Cross-border interoperability
CBDCs will not improve international payments if systems cannot interact across jurisdictions. Incompatible CBDCs could make international transactions more complex and more expensive. Interoperability has become a central focus of international pilots and central bank collaboration.
CBDCs and compliance
While CBDCs represent a change in payment infrastructure, they do not remove compliance obligations.
The illicit finance risk in CBDC design comes from three places. Offline payment tiers and lighter KYC checks at low transaction values create openings for abuse. Cross-border interoperability creates new sanctions screening and transaction monitoring challenges. And a state-issued digital currency can itself become a sanctions target, as the digital ruble has.
In most two-tier systems, commercial banks and payment providers still carry the core compliance functions they carry for conventional accounts: KYC, anti-money laundering (AML) obligations, sanctions screening and transaction monitoring. Existing rules may also carry over. The Travel Rule, which requires originator and beneficiary data to accompany fund transfers, could apply to certain CBDC transactions depending on how jurisdictions classify and implement them.
The underlying technology differs from traditional banking infrastructure. Financial institutions may need new monitoring, tracing and investigative capabilities rather than adapted versions of existing tools.
Where a CBDC is built on-chain, blockchain analytics supports these capabilities, which is especially important once sanctions are involved. When a jurisdiction designates a state-issued digital currency, as the EU did with the digital ruble, screening becomes an on-chain problem rather than a matter of blocking a named institution, as exposure can reach a compliant firm indirectly, through intermediaries, like exchanges outside the sanctioning jurisdiction.
The closest precedent is A7A5, a ruble-backed stablecoin created by sanctioned Russian interests to move value outside the Western banking system. Elliptic research tracked its rise and then its collapse under coordinated US, UK and EU designations, and ledger transparency is what made those measures enforceable. To understand how this kind of exposure reaches regulated firms, read our research on ruble-backed stablecoins and indirect sanctions exposure.
