Four years ago, the Bahamas became the first country to launch a central bank digital currency — the Sand Dollar. Nigeria followed with the eNaira in 2021. China’s digital yuan pilot, which began in 2020, had reached 260 million wallets by mid-2024. The era of central bank digital currencies has quietly arrived, and it is moving faster than most people realise.
According to the Atlantic Council’s CBDC Tracker, 134 countries — representing 98% of global GDP — are exploring a CBDC as of March 2025. Sixty-eight are in advanced stages (development, pilot or launch), up from 35 in 2020. The G20 economies, with the notable exception of the United States, are all pursuing CBDC programmes. China’s digital yuan (e-CNY) remains the largest pilot, with over $250 billion in cumulative transaction volume and integration with major payment platforms including Alipay and WeChat Pay.
The motivations vary. For China, the digital yuan is partly about financial inclusion (reaching the unbanked population), partly about surveillance (every transaction on the digital yuan ledger is visible to the central bank) and partly about geopolitical strategy — creating a payment infrastructure that operates beyond the SWIFT system and US dollar dominance. For the European Central Bank, the digital euro project, which entered its preparation phase in November 2023, is about sovereignty — ensuring that Europeans have access to a public digital payment option in a world increasingly dominated by private platforms (Visa, Mastercard) and foreign CBDCs.
The outlier is the United States. The Federal Reserve has been conspicuously cautious on a digital dollar, reflecting a deep political divide: some Republicans have described CBDCs as a surveillance tool and proposed legislation to block the Fed from issuing one, while some Democrats see a digital dollar as a tool for financial inclusion and maintaining dollar dominance. The Fed has said it will not issue a CBDC without congressional authorisation. Given the current political climate, that authorisation appears unlikely in the near term. The result is a growing gap between the US posture and the trajectory of the rest of the world’s major economies.