Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker

What is a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)? A CBDC is virtual money backed and issued by a central bank. As money and payments have become more digital, the world’s central banks have realized that they need to provide a public option—or let the future of money pass them by.

Hover over a country to see its status. Click on a country to learn more.

^{Last updated: September 2024}

Key findings

134 countries & currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC. In May 2020 that number was only 35. Currently, 66 countries are in the advanced phase of exploration—development, pilot, or launch.

Every G20 country is exploring a CBDC, with 19 of them in the advanced stages of CBDC exploration. Of those, 13 countries are already in the pilot stage. This includes Brazil, Japan, India, Australia, Russia, and Turkey.

Three countries have fully launched a CBDC—the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria. In Nigeria and the Bahamas, CBDC issuance has increased substantially. All three countries are focused on expanding the reach of their retail CBDCs domestically.

There is a new high of 44 ongoing CBDC pilots, including the digital euro. European countries—both in the euro area and beyond—are increasingly testing wholesale CBDCs, both domestically and across borders.

All original BRICS member states—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—are piloting a CBDC. Since last year, BRICS has actively promoted developing an alternate payments system to the dollar.

In every country with an advanced retail CBDC project, CBDCs are intermediated, meaning they are distributed through banks, financial institutions, and payments service providers.

The US is now participating in a cross-border wholesale CBDC project, Project Agorá, with 6 other major central banks. In May, the US House passed a bill prohibiting the direct issuance of a retail CBDC, but the Senate has not acted. CBDC continues to be an issue in the ongoing US presidential campaign.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the G7 sanctions response, cross-border wholesale CBDC projects have more than doubled. There are currently 13 of them—including Project mBridge—which connects banks in China, Thailand, the UAE, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia. mBridge is likely to expand to more countries this year.

Digital yuan (e-CNY) is still the largest CBDC pilot in the world. In June 2024, total transaction volume reached 7 trillion e-CNY ($986 billion) in 17 provincial regions across sectors such as education, healthcare, and tourism. This figure is nearly four times the 1.8 trillion yuan ($253 billion) recorded by the People’s Bank of China in June 2023.

Cross-border CBDC projects

Click on a project to learn more about participating countries and use cases

Timeline: Race for the future of money

Number of countries and currency unions exploring CBDC over time

CBDCs in circulation

The ABCs of CBDCs

What is a CBDC?

A Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is the digital form of a country’s fiat currency that is also a claim on the central bank. Instead of printing money, the central bank issues electronic coins or accounts backed by the full faith and credit of the government.

But don’t digital currencies already exist?

There are already thousands of digital currencies, commonly called cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is the most well-known fully decentralized cryptocurrency. Another type of cryptocurrency are stablecoins, whose value is pegged to an asset or a fiat currency like the dollar. Cryptocurrencies run on distributed-ledger technology, meaning that multiple devices all over the world, not one central hub, are constantly verifying the accuracy of the transaction. But this is different from a central bank issuing a digital currency.

So why would a government get into digital currencies?

There are many reasons to explore digital currencies, and the motivation of different countries for issuing CBDCs depends on their economic situation. Some common motivations are: promoting financial inclusion by providing easy and safer access to money for unbanked and underbanked populations; introducing competition and resilience in the domestic payments market, which might need incentives to provide cheaper and better access to money; increasing efficiency in payments and lowering transaction costs; creating programmable money and improving transparency in money flows; and providing for the seamless and easy flow of monetary and fiscal policy.

What are the challenges?

There are several challenges, and each one needs careful consideration before a country launches a CBDC. Citizens could pull too much money out of banks at once by purchasing CBDCs, triggering a run on banks—affecting their ability to lend and sending a shock to interest rates. This is especially a problem for countries with unstable financial systems. CBDCs also carry operational risks, since they are vulnerable to cyber attacks and need to be made resilient against them. Finally, CBDCs require a complex regulatory framework including privacy, consumer protection, and anti-money laundering standards which need to be made more robust before adopting this technology.

What are the national security implications of a CBDC?

New payments systems create externalities that impact the daily lives of citizens, and can possibly jeopardize the national security objectives of the country. They can, for example, limit the United States’ ability to track cross-border flows and enforce sanctions. In the long term, the absence of US leadership and standards setting can have geopolitical consequences, especially if China and other countries maintain their first-mover advantage in the development of CBDCs. Our work on digital currencies at the GeoEconomics Center is at this nexus of the future of money and national security.

Research Team: Ananya Kumar, Alisha Chhangani, Leila Hamilton, and Grace Kim

Contributions from: Nitya Biyani, Stefan de Villiers, Matt Goodman, Niels Graham, William Howlett, Amy Jeon, Reddy Lee, Roberto Lopez-Irizarry, Abhinav Vishwanath, Varsha Shankar, Greg Brownstein, Jessie Yin, and Phillip Meng.

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