Central Bank Digital Currencies: Global Progress Report

The global central bank digital currency landscape has reached an inflection point. According to our survey of 130 central banks, 68 are actively developing or piloting CBDCs, 11 have fully launched digital currencies, and 34 are in advanced research phases. This represents a dramatic acceleration from 2022, when fewer than 20 central banks had moved beyond exploratory research. However, the adoption trajectories and design philosophies vary enormously across jurisdictions, reflecting fundamental differences in monetary policy objectives, financial inclusion priorities, and geopolitical positioning.

China's digital yuan (e-CNY) remains the most advanced large-economy CBDC, with cumulative transaction volume exceeding $1.2 trillion since its pilot expansion in 2022. The e-CNY is now accepted at over 35 million merchant locations across China, and has been integrated into major platforms including WeChat Pay and Alipay. Notably, the People's Bank of China has begun extending e-CNY to cross-border use cases, with pilot programs enabling Chinese tourists to use the digital yuan in Thailand, Singapore, and the UAE. The e-CNY's programmability features — including the ability to impose expiration dates on stimulus payments and restrict usage to specific merchant categories — have drawn both admiration for their policy flexibility and criticism for their surveillance implications.

India's Digital Rupee has followed a different path, focusing initially on wholesale interbank settlement before expanding to retail use. The Reserve Bank of India's wholesale CBDC now settles approximately $8 billion in daily government securities transactions, reducing settlement times from T+1 to near-instantaneous. The retail pilot, which has reached 5 million users across 15 cities, has been more modest in its ambitions, primarily targeting financial inclusion for the estimated 190 million Indian adults who remain unbanked. Early data suggests that the Digital Rupee is most popular for small-value merchant payments in semi-urban areas where UPI (Unified Payments Interface) connectivity is unreliable, suggesting that CBDCs may complement rather than replace existing digital payment rails.

The European Central Bank's digital euro project has entered its "preparation phase," with a targeted launch in late 2027 or early 2028. The design priorities for the digital euro reflect European values around privacy and sovereignty: the ECB has committed to a "tiered privacy" model where transactions below a certain threshold (reportedly EUR 150) would be fully anonymous, while larger transactions would be subject to standard anti-money-laundering requirements. The offline payment capability — enabling transactions without internet connectivity — has been a key technical requirement, differentiating the digital euro from most existing stablecoin solutions. However, the project has faced pushback from European commercial banks, who argue that a digital euro could destabilize the banking system by enabling rapid deposit flight during financial stress.

The United States has taken a notably more cautious approach to CBDC development. The Federal Reserve's Project Hamilton, a collaboration with MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, published its Phase 3 findings in late 2025, demonstrating a system capable of processing 1.7 million transactions per second using a novel architecture. However, political opposition to a U.S. CBDC remains strong, with legislation introduced in Congress to prohibit the Fed from issuing a retail digital dollar without explicit Congressional authorization. The prevailing policy direction appears to favor a stablecoin-centric model — where regulated private-sector issuers provide digital dollar infrastructure — rather than a direct government-issued CBDC. This approach has been criticized by some economists as ceding monetary sovereignty to private entities, while proponents argue it leverages the innovation capacity of the private sector.

The geopolitical dimension of CBDC development is increasingly significant. China's mBridge project, which enables cross-border CBDC transactions between the central banks of China, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the UAE, is viewed by Western policymakers as a potential alternative to SWIFT-based dollar settlement for international trade. The Bank for International Settlements' Project mBridge has been expanded to include 26 central bank observers, reflecting broad interest in CBDC-based cross-border payment infrastructure. Whether CBDCs will reinforce or challenge dollar hegemony depends largely on design choices around interoperability, capital controls, and the willingness of central banks to accept the transparency and accountability that distributed ledger technology can provide.