The Global CBDC Landscape
The Atlantic Council’s CBDC Tracker counts 134 countries and currency unions — representing 98% of global GDP — exploring central bank digital currencies as of early 2025. That’s up from 35 countries in 2020. Of those, 68 are in advanced stages (development, pilot, or launch), up from 36 in 2023. The trend line is unambiguous: CBDCs are coming, though at very different speeds and for very different reasons.
China: The Digital Yuan Pioneer
China’s digital yuan (e-CNY) is the world’s most advanced CBDC by a wide margin. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) began piloting in 2020 and has expanded to 26 cities and regions, with over 260 million digital wallets opened as of mid-2024. Cumulative transaction volume has exceeded 1.8 trillion yuan (approximately $250 billion).
The digital yuan is a two-tier system: the PBOC issues the digital currency to commercial banks, which distribute it to users. It uses “managed anonymity” — small transactions are private, large transactions are traceable, and all transactions are visible to the central bank. This is fundamentally different from the “privacy by default” model of cash.
Adoption has been slower than Beijing expected. The digital yuan competes with Alipay and WeChat Pay, which already serve over 1 billion users with seamless QR code payments. The government has resorted to paying civil servants in e-CNY and integrating it into public transit systems to drive usage, but organic adoption remains limited. The “why would I use this instead of Alipay?” question hasn’t been compellingly answered.
The geopolitical dimension matters too. China is using the digital yuan to advance RMB internationalization, particularly through the mBridge project — a cross-border CBDC platform co-developed with Hong Kong, Thailand, and the UAE that has processed real-value cross-border transactions. If mBridge succeeds, it could reduce reliance on SWIFT and the US dollar for settlement, which is exactly what China wants.
Nigeria: The Cautionary Tale
Nigeria’s eNaira, launched in October 2021, was the first CBDC in Africa. Two years later, adoption remains dismal — less than 1% of the population has used it. The reasons are instructive: limited smartphone penetration, unreliable internet access, competition from established mobile money services, and a botched demonetization effort in early 2023 (replacing old naira notes with new ones) that made many Nigerians suspicious of anything that smelled like government control of money.
The eNaira’s struggles illustrate a broader point: CBDCs are only useful if they solve a real problem that existing payment systems don’t. In Nigeria, mobile money and cash already provide payment rails. Adding a CBDC without addressing the underlying infrastructure challenges is building a Ferrari on a dirt road.
Sweden: The E-Krona Experiment
Sweden is the most cashless society in the world — only about 8% of Swedes used cash for their most recent purchase, according to the Riksbank. The e-krona pilot, now in its fourth phase, is a response to the near-disappearance of physical cash. The Riksbank is testing both DLT-based and conventional technical architectures, and the pilot includes offline payment capabilities — a critical feature for a CBDC intended to serve as a backup when digital infrastructure fails.
Sweden hasn’t decided whether to actually launch the e-krona. The deliberation is genuinely careful — weighing financial inclusion for the elderly and disabled (who struggle with purely digital payments), privacy concerns, and the risk of disrupting a banking system that already works well. It’s the opposite of a rushed CBDC launch.
The Digital Euro
The European Central Bank moved its digital euro project from investigation to preparation phase in late 2023, with a decision on issuance expected around 2025-2026. The digital euro is designed for retail payments — a complement to cash, not a replacement — with strict privacy protections (the ECB would not be able to identify individual users from transaction data) and holding limits (likely €3,000-4,000 per person to prevent bank disintermediation).
The politics are complicated. European banks are lobbying hard against the digital euro, arguing it would pull deposits out of the banking system. Privacy advocates argue the holding limits are too low to be useful. US politicians have characterized the digital euro as an anti-dollar weapon. The ECB is trying to navigate all of this while building a functional CBDC — not envious work.
The US: Nowhere Near
The United States is the notable laggard among major economies. The Federal Reserve has been researching a digital dollar since 2022, but has explicitly stated it won’t proceed without Congressional authorization — which is nowhere in sight. The political opposition is bipartisan but for different reasons: Republicans see CBDCs as government overreach and a surveillance tool (Ron DeSantis signed a Florida law banning CBDCs, and several other red states have followed), while some Democrats prioritize financial inclusion but worry about privacy and bank disintermediation.
FedNow — the Federal Reserve’s instant payment system launched in July 2023 — is sometimes confused with a CBDC but is fundamentally different. FedNow is a payment rail that moves commercial bank money instantly, like an upgraded ACH. A CBDC would be a new form of central bank money. The distinction matters, but good luck explaining it on cable news.
What CBDCs Mean (and Don’t Mean)
CBDCs are often portrayed as either the future of money or the death of financial privacy. Neither framing is accurate. The reality is more mundane: CBDCs are a technological upgrade to central bank money, offering programmability, instant settlement, and offline capability. They’ll coexist with commercial bank money, stablecoins, and cash for decades.
The real question isn’t whether CBDCs will exist — they will, in some form, in most countries — but how they’re designed. Privacy protections, holding limits, interest-bearing vs. non-interest-bearing, technology architecture, offline capability — these design choices determine whether a CBDC is a tool of financial surveillance or financial inclusion. The technology is neutral. The policy is everything.