What Works & What Doesn't — CBDC Evidence-Based Assessment

Purpose

This document synthesises the findings of all eleven Phase 2 CBDC guidance documents into a single evidence-based assessment, drawing on the verified per-jurisdiction record for all 20 studied jurisdictions. Every claim below is drawn from verified data already in the repository. The structure groups findings into what clearly does not work, what clearly works, what produces mixed results, and a distilled playbook of evidence-based principles.

The CBDC Adoption Paradox

The central finding across all eleven guidance documents is what the Economic Outcomes analysis terms the "CBDC adoption paradox." No launched retail CBDC has exceeded 0.5% of currency in circulation. The Bahamas Sand Dollar represents roughly 0.39% of physical cash. Nigeria's eNaira accounts for about 0.37% of currency in circulation. Jamaica's JAM-DEX sits at approximately 0.1%. India's Digital Rupee (e₹-R) holds only about 0.42% of the population in wallet penetration. Even China's e-CNY — by far the largest CBDC experiment, with CNY 16.7 trillion in cumulative transactions as of November 2025 (self-reported by the PBOC) — remained only about 0.16% of M0 and a small fraction of Alipay and WeChat Pay volumes, which together command over 90% of mobile payments.

Cash circulation has not decreased in any CBDC jurisdiction. The Bahamas reported a 20% increase in physical cash since launching the Sand Dollar (The Tribune, Jan 2025). Jamaica's cash dependency is unchanged — currency in circulation actually rose ~13% year-on-year after Hurricane Melissa (Nov 2025). China's physical renminbi circulation remains stable. This directly contradicts the assumption — present in early BIS and IMF literature — that CBDC availability would naturally reduce cash usage.

The paradox is this: the jurisdictions that need CBDC most (developing economies with large unbanked populations and weak payment infrastructure) have produced the worst outcomes when they launched. The jurisdictions with the most sophisticated designs (EU, UK) have not yet launched and have taken no decision to do so. And the jurisdiction with the most operational data (China) reclassified its instrument from a central bank liability (M0) toward a commercial bank deposit-money model effective 1 January 2026 — a pivot the Peterson Institute argues may mean it no longer qualifies as a CBDC. The evidence base, while narrow, is instructive — and it demands honest assessment rather than institutional optimism.

The BIS 2024 survey found that 91% of 93 central banks are exploring CBDCs, with 49 pilot projects active globally. Yet across the 20 jurisdictions studied here, only six instruments have ever reached a live or launched retail state — the Bahamas Sand Dollar, Nigeria's eNaira, Jamaica's JAM-DEX, the Eastern Caribbean DCash (pilot concluded Jan 2024; successor DCash 2.0 suspended Feb 2026), China's e-CNY (large-scale pilot), and India's e₹ (pilot) — and these collectively demonstrate that exploration and successful deployment are separated by a chasm of execution challenges that no amount of technical sophistication alone can bridge. The gap between "exploring" and "succeeding" is where the evidence in this assessment concentrates.

The EU's estimated EUR 1.3 billion development cost and EUR 320 million annual operating cost for the digital euro — the only jurisdiction to publish transparent cost data — underscores the scale of investment required. For small island developing states, the cost calculus is even less favourable, which partly explains the ECCB's decision (13 February 2026) to abandon DCash 2.0 in favour of a less ambitious but more achievable Fast Payment System plus CARICOM (CAPS) integration.

1. What Clearly Doesn't Work

1.1 Launching Without a Legal Framework

Nigeria launched the eNaira on 25 October 2021 without dedicated legislation, relying on Regulatory Guidelines issued under Section 19 of the CBN Act, 2007 rather than a standalone statute. The result: 98.5% of wallets were inactive after one year (IMF WP/23/104, self-reported).

China operated the e-CNY for over five years in what scholars described as a "legal vacuum" (the draft amended PBOC Law remains unenacted), and on 1 January 2026 reclassified the instrument from an M0 central bank liability toward a commercial bank deposit-money model — a change that fundamentally altered the instrument's nature. By contrast,

Jamaica became the first country to give CBDC legal tender status by statute (Bank of Jamaica (Amendment) Act 2022, enacted 14 June 2022), and the

EU produced COM(2023) 369 — the most comprehensive CBDC legislative proposal globally. The evidence is unambiguous: launching before legislation is in place produces public distrust and forces disruptive mid-course corrections.

The legislative models identified across jurisdictions — dedicated statute, central bank act amendment, reliance on existing authority, prohibition, consultation-stage, and combined CBDC-plus-crypto frameworks — show a clear hierarchy of outcomes. Dedicated legislation (Jamaica's statutory legal tender designation; the EU's proposed Regulation) produces the strongest foundation. Reliance on existing authority alone (Nigeria, early China) produces the weakest. No jurisdiction that launched under existing authority alone has achieved meaningful adoption.

Source documents: Legal Framework & Authorization; Economic Outcomes; Implementation Guide.

1.2 Coercing Adoption Through Cash Restrictions

Nigeria combined eNaira promotion with aggressive cash withdrawal limits (N100,000/week for individuals, N500,000/week for businesses) and a chaotic naira redesign in late 2022. The outcome was not CBDC adoption but a national crisis — protests, attacks on bank branches, and a liquidity shortage that required emergency intervention. The IMF concluded that coercive measures "undermined trust" and failed to drive meaningful digital currency usage. Meanwhile, cash circulation rose 20% in the

Bahamas despite the Sand Dollar's availability since 2020. The lesson: restricting cash pushes populations toward informal channels, not toward CBDC.

The broader pattern is consistent: no CBDC has displaced cash through mandate. Cash in circulation has remained stable or increased in every CBDC jurisdiction — Bahamas (+20%), Jamaica (unchanged then up ~13% YoY post-hurricane), Nigeria (restored after crisis), China (physical renminbi circulation stable). The 58% of Europeans who consider themselves "unlikely or very unlikely" to use the digital euro (ECB survey, March 2025) further confirms that CBDC adoption cannot be manufactured through policy pressure alone.

Source documents: Financial Inclusion; Economic Outcomes; Implementation Guide.

1.3 Single-Vendor Technology Dependency

The Eastern Caribbean DCash, built on Hyperledger Fabric and operated by Bitt Inc., suffered an approximately two-month complete outage (January–March 2022, roughly 56 days) caused by expired Fabric identity certificates — a routine maintenance failure that no one at the ECCB or Bitt had systems in place to prevent. The Bahamas Sand Dollar depends on NZIA Limited (now Movmint), a small firm, for its Cortex DLT platform.

Jamaica relies on eCurrency Mint as its sole technology provider, creating a bottleneck where "all roads lead through one company." Single-vendor dependency concentrates operational risk, leaves central banks without leverage, and produces fragility in production systems. That the ECCB ultimately suspended DCash 2.0 development in February 2026 — the successor that was meant to fix exactly these weaknesses — underscores how hard the dependency is to escape once embedded.

The UK's approach — open API architecture with 33 API functions demonstrated through Project Rosalind — offers a structural alternative. By defining standard interfaces that multiple providers can implement, the central bank avoids dependency on any single technology vendor while maintaining architectural control. The EU's selection of EU-controlled service providers for the digital euro preparation phase (framework agreements estimated at EUR 432.1 million, with a potential maximum of EUR 1.164 billion, announced 2 October 2025) similarly distributes vendor risk across multiple firms.

Source documents: Technology & Design Choices; Licensing Frameworks; Implementation Guide.

1.4 Over-Ambitious DLT Architecture Without Proven Privacy Solutions

Brazil spent four years (2021–2025) attempting to build Drex on a permissioned blockchain (Hyperledger Besu) with zero-knowledge proofs for privacy. In August 2025, BCB Governor Galípolo concluded at Blockchain Rio that "the blockchain tested did not prove viable"; the BCB had found that the privacy technologies tested — Zether, Starlight, Rayls, ZKP Nova, Hamsa — had not demonstrated the maturity needed to reconcile banking secrecy with the central bank's monetary and AML visibility. On 4 November 2025 the BCB told consortia it would decommission the Besu platform and rebuild "from scratch"; the Besu Drex platform was decommissioned on 10 November 2025, and the project was re-scoped from "programmable money" toward a narrower Phase 3 focus on collateral and lien reconciliation, with no firm launch date. The BCB termed the underlying obstacle a "trilemma" of privacy, decentralization, and programmability. The BIS Project Tourbillon demonstrated that blind signatures can deliver payer anonymity, but this was a research prototype, not a production system. Starting with unproven technology at scale wastes years and budgets.

The contrast with successful architectures is instructive. China built the e-CNY on a centralized/hybrid architecture entirely in-house, avoiding DLT consensus overhead and achieving reported capacity exceeding 300,000 TPS (not independently verified). The EU's N-XT settlement engine uses a UTXO data model on a centralized platform that does not need to know which wallet holds the UTXOs, nor the identity or pseudonym of their owner, to process transactions — achieving privacy by architecture rather than by layering cryptographic proofs onto an inherently transparent blockchain.

Sweden's e-Krona, after a four-phase technical pilot on R3 Corda, pivoted to an offline card model in its final phase before concluding the pilot in 2024. The pattern is clear: DLT is a research tool for CBDC, not a production prerequisite.

Source documents: Privacy & Data Protection; Technology & Design Choices; Implementation Guide.

1.5 Ignoring Existing Dominant Payment Infrastructure

India launched the Digital Rupee retail pilot in December 2022 into a market where UPI already processed over 20 billion transactions per month with 500+ million unique users. The e₹-R reached roughly 7–8 million users and on the order of 200,000 transactions per day, a rounding error against UPI volume — and, tellingly, its circulation contracted about 24% year-on-year to ₹771.7 crore (~US$90 million) as of 31 March 2026 (self-reported, RBI Annual Report 2025-26), the first reported decline. The RBI's own pivot toward programmable welfare delivery (Gujarat G-SAFAL, AP DEEPAM 2.0, Puducherry PMGKAY) acknowledges implicitly that the e₹ cannot compete with UPI for general payments. Similarly, the ECCB suspended DCash 2.0 in February 2026 in favour of a Fast Payment System, concluding that conventional infrastructure modernization delivers needed benefits more reliably. A CBDC that duplicates what already works will not be adopted.

The World Bank's question — "Is Central Bank Digital Currency the Right Tool to Expand Financial Inclusion?" — applies equally to general payments. Brazil's Pix brought 71 million previously unbanked or underbanked Brazilians into the formal digital economy within four years of its November 2020 launch, reaching 150+ million users (76% of the adult population) by 2025. M-Pesa in Kenya reached tens of millions of customers across multiple countries without any CBDC. The IMF's Fintech Note 2024/006 provides a decision framework for when CBDC adds value beyond what fast payment systems already provide — and in most cases, it does not for general retail payments.

South Africa reached the same conclusion in its November 2025 Position Paper, finding PayShap real-time payments and NPS expansion address inclusion more effectively than a retail CBDC near-term.

Source documents: Financial Inclusion; Economic Outcomes; Technology & Design Choices.

1.6 Prohibiting CBDC Without an Alternative Digital Strategy

The

United States holds the most negative position on the spectrum: Executive Order 14178 (signed 23 January 2025) bans all federal CBDC activity and revoked the prior EO 14067, and it remains the binding prohibition in force. A statutory ban has advanced but is not yet enacted — the House passed the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act (H.R. 1919) 219-210 on 17 July 2025, and a separate CBDC moratorium (through 31 December 2030) passed the Senate within the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 89-10 on 12 March 2026 and an amended version passed the House 396-13 on 20 May 2026 — but the two chambers' versions remain unreconciled, so no statutory CBDC ban has become law. Kevin Warsh, who opposes a retail CBDC, was sworn in as Federal Reserve Chair on 22 May 2026 (Senate-confirmed 54-45). This posture forecloses a Federal Reserve digital dollar without offering an alternative sovereign digital payment instrument. Meanwhile, the GENIUS Act (S. 1582), signed into law on 18 July 2025 as Public Law 119-27, establishes a federal stablecoin framework — effectively ceding the digital sovereign money space to private issuers. The US approach is a policy experiment with no precedent among major economies, and its long-term consequences for dollar dominance in digital payments remain untested.

The stablecoin landscape presents a concrete competitive threat. The GENIUS Act's regulated stablecoin framework, combined with the federal CBDC prohibition, positions dollar-denominated stablecoins as the de facto US digital sovereign money instrument. Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC already command the vast majority of the roughly USD 312–320 billion stablecoin market. For countries considering CBDC, the US approach raises a strategic question: if the world's reserve currency issuer relies on private stablecoins rather than CBDC, does this validate a stablecoin-first model, or does it create a vulnerability that CBDC in other jurisdictions should address? The evidence from the Stablecoin Coexistence guidance suggests the answer depends on whether each jurisdiction's goal is monetary sovereignty or payment efficiency.

Source documents: Legal Framework & Authorization; Stablecoin Coexistence.

1.7 Full Surveillance Design Without Judicial Safeguards

Russia's digital ruble provides the Central Bank of Russia with complete visibility over all transactions; the CBR explicitly states that settlements "do not provide for the anonymity of payments," and unique identifiers enable full traceability. The privacy model is rated "Very Weak." Survey data (media-sourced, indicative only) indicates over 50% of Russian citizens are unwilling to use the digital ruble, with privacy concerns cited as a primary reason. The CBR's own pilot reported only about 2,500 wallets across 15 banks as of June 2025 (self-reported). Russia has nonetheless legally mandated a large-scale launch from 1 September 2026, with government and budget use already live since 1 January 2026 — making this one of the most legally-formalised CBDC programmes globally, and a test of whether mandate can overcome resistance. A CBDC designed for surveillance rather than user benefit generates public resistance that no amount of mandate can easily overcome.

The contrast with China's "controllable anonymity" model is instructive. While China's approach — "small amounts are anonymous, big amounts are traceable" — has drawn international criticism for the government's retained technical capability to de-anonymise, it at least provides functional anonymity for small transactions (Category 4 wallets: phone number only, CNY 10,000 balance cap). Russia's model offers no such gradient. The Cambridge University analysis similarly found that Nigeria's eNaira design "misapprehends the meaning and scope of informed consent to data processing, allows monitoring and tracking of users" — another surveillance-adjacent model that failed to win public trust.

Source documents: Privacy & Data Protection; Compliance & Enforcement; Licensing Frameworks.

1.8 Insufficient Merchant Acceptance Networks

Jamaica's JAM-DEX had only about 2,379 registered merchants as of September 2024, and outgoing BOJ Governor Byles in May 2026 called the slow adoption "a disappointment" while pushing banks to accelerate POS integration. The Bahamas Sand Dollar reported roughly 2,100 business wallets by November 2024, with merchant acceptance still thin. Nigeria's eNaira similarly lacked merchant acceptance infrastructure (merchant wallet downloads reached only ~10% of POS merchants in year one). Without merchants, a CBDC has nowhere to be spent, and without spending utility, consumers have no reason to hold it. Every launched CBDC demonstrates that merchant onboarding is the binding constraint — not wallet creation, not technology, not legal tender status.

The compensation problem compounds the merchant challenge. A CBDC that charges no fees to users must still compensate intermediaries who distribute it. The EU's ongoing negotiation over merchant fee structures illustrates the difficulty, and no jurisdiction has yet created a standalone CBDC intermediary licence with defined compensation rights. China's zero-fee model is subsidised by the PBOC and unsustainable for most central banks. Until the compensation model is solved, intermediaries have no incentive to build out merchant acceptance infrastructure — which is precisely why the Bahamas resorted to a mandate (July 2024 two-year plan requiring commercial-bank Sand Dollar integration) and why Jamaica's banks were repeatedly criticised for failing to invest in terminals.

Source documents: Financial Inclusion; Economic Outcomes; Licensing Frameworks.

1.9 Fast-Track Implementation Timelines

Nigeria implemented the eNaira in approximately 9 months from announcement to launch. The result was an underdeveloped ecosystem, no dedicated legal framework, inadequate merchant networks, and a product that the public neither trusted nor needed — and by November 2025 the CBN had publicly acknowledged that the eNaira was "not a rosy story" and pivoted toward a wholesale CBDC focus. By contrast, the EU's deliberate multi-year model (2020 investigation, 2023 legislative proposal, 2023–2025 preparation phase concluded October 2025, potential first issuance only in 2029) has produced the most sophisticated design framework globally. China's phased pilot over 4+ years across progressively more cities allowed iterative learning. Speed of launch correlates negatively with adoption success across every jurisdiction studied.

The Implementation Guide identifies six common failure patterns across all launched CBDCs: (1) insufficient stakeholder engagement, (2) technology-first rather than use-case-first design, (3) underestimating merchant and intermediary economics, (4) inadequate legal foundations, (5) ignoring existing payment ecosystem dynamics, and (6) unrealistic timeline expectations. Nigeria's 9-month implementation exhibited all six simultaneously. No launched CBDC that exhibited three or more of these patterns has achieved meaningful adoption.

Source documents: Implementation Guide; Economic Outcomes; Legal Framework & Authorization.

2. What Clearly Works

2.1 Holding Limits to Prevent Bank Disintermediation

The

EU modelled a EUR 3,000 per-person holding limit in the Commission impact assessment (with the Council in December 2025 providing for an ECB-set limit within a Council-agreed ceiling, reviewed at least every two years), based on ECB modelling of deposit-outflow scenarios. The

UK proposed a GBP 10,000–20,000 individual holding limit, with detailed BoE analysis of the impact on bank lending capacity (Financial Stability Paper No. 53, November 2025) and the Treasury Committee recommending limits closer to the EU's EUR 3,000. BIS Working Paper 1280 confirms that holding limits are the primary tool for managing disintermediation risk, and every advanced-economy CBDC design now includes them. Tiered balance caps also appear in launched systems — China's Category 4-to-1 caps (CNY 10,000 up to CNY 500,000), Nigeria's tiered wallet limits, the Bahamas' B$8,000 personal cap, and India's ₹1,00,000 wallet ceiling. The evidence base — from ECB staff papers, BoE discussion papers, and BIS research — represents the most rigorous policy modelling in the entire CBDC domain.

The waterfall and reverse waterfall mechanisms designed for managing the holding limit — automatically sweeping excess CBDC to a linked bank account when the limit is exceeded, and topping up from the bank account to receive incoming payments — represent sophisticated engineering that addresses the practical friction of hard caps. Both the EU and UK have designed these mechanisms (the EU applies a zero limit with mandatory waterfall for business and public-authority accounts), ensuring that holding limits do not prevent users from receiving payments that would temporarily exceed the cap.

Source documents: Monetary Policy Impact; Legal Framework & Authorization.

2.2 Two-Tier Distribution Through Regulated Intermediaries

Every operational and planned CBDC uses a two-tier model: the central bank issues and redeems the CBDC; regulated intermediaries (banks, PSPs, e-money institutions) distribute it to the public. No central bank has attempted or advocated direct retail distribution.

China's authorized-operator model (22 operators as of 2 April 2026, after 12 banks were added), the EU's supervised-PSP model, the UK's Payment Interface Provider (PIP) and External Service Interface Provider (ESIP) framework, and even Nigeria's bank-based distribution all follow this pattern. The model preserves the central bank's role in monetary operations while leveraging existing private-sector customer relationships and infrastructure. It is the single most universal design consensus in CBDC.

The model also allows competitive innovation at the intermediary layer while maintaining central bank control at the core. The UK's ESIP framework explicitly enables non-bank fintechs to build value-added services on top of the digital pound without direct access to the core ledger. The EU requires all credit institutions in the eurozone to distribute the digital euro — the broadest mandatory participation base of any CBDC. This architectural separation of concerns (central bank handles issuance/settlement, intermediaries handle distribution/innovation) is the foundation on which every other design decision rests.

Source documents: Technology & Design Choices; Licensing Frameworks; Monetary Policy Impact.

2.3 Privacy-First Design With Legislative Guarantees

The

UK Parliament secured a government commitment to enshrine digital pound privacy protections in primary legislation — neither the Bank of England nor the Government would access users' personal data. Over 50,000 responses to the UK consultation process were driven primarily by privacy concerns. The EU's dual-tier privacy architecture combines offline cash-equivalent privacy (known only to payer and payee) with pseudonymised online transactions where the Eurosystem cannot identify individual users; the EDPB/EDPS Joint Opinion 02/2023 urged a low-value online privacy threshold. The BIS Project Tourbillon proved blind signatures can deliver cryptographic payer anonymity. Jurisdictions that lead with privacy — rather than treating it as an afterthought — generate greater public trust and political support.

The four privacy models identified across jurisdictions — cash-equivalent anonymity (EU offline, BIS Tourbillon), tiered/controllable anonymity (China, India, Nigeria), pseudonymised with law enforcement access (EU online, UK, Brazil), and full surveillance (Russia) — produce a clear hierarchy of public acceptance. The cash-equivalent and pseudonymised-with-safeguards models generate the strongest public support. Tiered/controllable anonymity is tolerated where trust in government is high. The full-surveillance model (Russia) generates active resistance (>50% unwilling). The privacy-enhancing technologies that make the stronger models possible — blind signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, trusted execution environments, UTXO one-time addresses, pseudonymisation — are mature enough for production in some implementations (EU N-XT, BIS Tourbillon) but not all (Brazil's ZKP failure). The technology choice must match the privacy ambition.

Source documents: Privacy & Data Protection; Legal Framework & Authorization; Compliance & Enforcement.

2.4 Deliberate Multi-Year Consultation and Phased Design

The UK's digital pound consultation attracted over 50,000 responses — more than any other CBDC public engagement globally. The EU's preparation phase (2023–2025, concluded October 2025) involved extensive stakeholder input from banking associations, merchant groups, data protection authorities, and civil society. These consultations produced materially better designs: the EDPB/EDPS privacy recommendations reshaped the digital euro's privacy architecture, and the European Parliament rapporteur's revised draft (presented to ECON 5 November 2025) initially proposed an offline-first approach before Parliament's February 2026 amendments endorsed both online and offline functionality. Front-loading consultation delays launch but reduces the risk of deploying a product the public will reject.

The EU's stakeholder engagement extends beyond the general public. Banking associations, merchant groups (e.g., EuroCommerce), data protection authorities (EDPB, EDPS, national DPAs), payment processors, and civil society organisations have all had structured input into the digital euro's design. The result is a design that reflects compromises across competing interests — privacy advocates, financial stability authorities, payment industry incumbents, and consumer protection bodies — rather than a top-down central bank blueprint. This multi-stakeholder approach is slower but produces designs with broader political legitimacy.

Source documents: Implementation Guide; Privacy & Data Protection; Legal Framework & Authorization.

2.5 Phased Piloting With Geographic and Feature Expansion

China's e-CNY expanded from 4 pilot cities (April 2020) to 26–29+ cities across 17 provinces by 2025, adding features iteratively — merchant integration, public transit, government disbursements, Alipay/WeChat Pay front-end integration. Each phase generated data that informed the next, including the December 2025 PBOC Action Plan that introduced interest-bearing wallets and the deposit-money model from 1 January 2026. The RBI's Digital Rupee pilot similarly started with 4 banks and 4 cities before expanding to about 19 banks.

Sweden's e-Krona completed four distinct pilot phases, each testing different technology (R3 Corda in Phases 1–3, an offline EMV card in Phase 4) before concluding the technical pilot in 2024. Phased piloting generates real operational data, surfaces integration problems early, and allows design pivots before national rollout.

The value of phased piloting extends beyond technology testing. China's expansion generated data on consumer behaviour, merchant integration friction, incentive effectiveness, and interoperability with existing payment platforms. The discovery that average transaction values were declining from CNY 1,895 (2023) to CNY 428 (2025) — indicating incentive-driven rather than organic usage — was only possible because of the multi-year data trail. Similarly, Sweden's four pilot phases each tested fundamentally different architectures, enabling the Riksbank to compare approaches rather than committing prematurely to one. The implementation guide identifies this iterative approach as the single strongest predictor of eventual design quality.

Source documents: Implementation Guide; Technology & Design Choices; Economic Outcomes.

2.6 Cross-Border Wholesale CBDC for Settlement

The BIS mBridge project reported about 4,047 transactions worth roughly USD 55.49 billion in real-value cross-border settlement across the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia — the largest cross-border CBDC settlement to date (self-reported, not independently audited).

Australia's Project Acacia, whose final report (mr-26-13) was published on 18 May 2026, issued A$4.4 million in pilot wholesale CBDC across 8 of its 20 use cases (12 pilot + 8 proof-of-concept), with DFCRC estimating up to A$24 billion/year in potential gains (a self-reported research estimate).

Singapore executed its first live wholesale CBDC transaction (overnight interbank lending) on the SGD Testnet in November 2025, and

Canada's Project Samara settled a CAD $100 million tokenized bond against wholesale W-CAD on 5 March 2026. Wholesale CBDC has demonstrated clear value for settlement efficiency where retail CBDC has struggled to find its use case.

The geopolitical dimension is notable: the BIS withdrew from mBridge in October 2024 amid concerns about the project's potential use for sanctions evasion, reorienting its flagship cross-border effort to Project Agora (Agorá) — a unified-ledger approach whose first-phase report (27 May 2026) confirmed atomic multi-currency wholesale settlement is feasible and which now advances to real-value testing with multiple participating central banks. The BRICS Bridge concept remains largely aspirational. BIS Project Icebreaker's hub-and-spoke architecture, where each central bank connects only to a central hub and maintains full sovereignty over its domestic CBDC, offers a politically sustainable model for multilateral interoperability — bilateral arrangements, while simpler, do not scale, as a network of N central banks requires N(N-1)/2 bilateral links.

Source documents: Cross-Border Interoperability; Technology & Design Choices.

2.7 Programmable Government Welfare Delivery

India's pivot toward programmable CBDC for welfare represents the strongest evidence-based use case for retail CBDC. The Gujarat G-SAFAL programme uses smart-contract-enabled e₹ for agricultural livelihood payments; AP DEEPAM 2.0 distributes cooking gas subsidies through programmable CBDC wallets; and a CBDC-based Digital Food Currency pilot launched in Puducherry under PMGKAY (via Canara Bank) on 26 February 2026 — a scheme that, if scaled to its 80-crore (800-million) target beneficiary base, would be the world's largest CBDC welfare delivery. These programmes target the specific problem that CBDC can solve better than existing rails — conditional transfers that ensure funds reach intended beneficiaries and are spent on intended purposes — rather than competing with UPI for general payments. The strategic significance is heightened by the e₹-R's first reported circulation contraction (~24% in FY2025-26): programmability is not merely a strategic choice but the e₹'s clearest path to relevance.

The key insight is that programmable welfare targets the one domain where CBDC offers clear differentiation over existing payment rails. UPI can transfer money instantly, but it cannot enforce that a food subsidy is spent on food. Bank transfers can reach beneficiaries, but leakage and diversion remain persistent problems in developing-country welfare systems. India's vast government transfer apparatus makes it the most significant test case for whether programmable CBDC can deliver measurable efficiency gains in welfare delivery. The early programmes are small, but the strategic direction — niche programmability rather than general payments — is the most evidence-aligned retail CBDC strategy globally.

South Korea is now testing a parallel model, with its Project Hangang Phase 2 (resumed March 2026) paying EV-charging subsidies in deposit tokens — a world-first national-treasury digital-currency operation.

Source documents: Financial Inclusion; Technology & Design Choices; Economic Outcomes.

2.8 Purpose-Bound Money Protocols

Singapore's Purpose-Bound Money (PBM) protocol wraps digital currency (CBDC, tokenised deposits, or regulated stablecoins) in programmable conditions that specify how, where, and when it can be spent — then unwraps to fungible money upon redemption. MAS completed over 10 PBM trials (as of October 2025) for commercial vouchers, government payouts, and pre-authorised payments. The protocol is currency-agnostic and form-factor agnostic. PBM demonstrates that programmability can coexist with fungibility if the architecture separates the condition layer from the money layer.

South Korea (conditional-spending deposit tokens) and

Thailand (the SCB 10X "Purpose Bound Money" entry in BOT's Programmable Payment Sandbox) have adopted closely related models.

The distinction between programmable money and programmable payments is critical. Programmable money embeds conditions in the currency itself (restricting where or how it can be spent). Programmable payments embed conditions in the payment transaction (executing automatically when conditions are met). Singapore's PBM and India's welfare programmes use programmable money. The EU digital euro explicitly excludes programmable money ("would never be programmable money") while supporting conditional payments as PSP value-added services, keeping the euro itself fungible. The choice between these approaches has significant implications for monetary sovereignty and user freedom, and the evidence does not yet favour one over the other.

Source documents: Technology & Design Choices; Stablecoin Coexistence.

2.9 Non-Remuneration as Default Policy

The consensus across BIS, IMF, and most launched CBDCs is that retail CBDC should pay zero interest. This minimises the risk of deposit flight from banks to CBDC during normal times and during stress. The EU digital euro, UK digital pound, Bahamas Sand Dollar, Jamaica JAM-DEX, India e₹, Nigeria eNaira, and Russia's digital ruble all adopt non-remuneration. BIS Working Paper 1280 and ECB staff modelling confirm that non-remuneration, combined with holding limits, is the primary safeguard against bank disintermediation. The policy orthodoxy is well-founded in evidence and modelling from multiple central banks.

China's 1 January 2026 introduction of 0.05% interest on verified e-CNY wallets (Categories 1–3, with the first quarterly payout on 20 March 2026) is the sole exception to the global non-remuneration consensus — and it represents a fundamental departure, accompanied by the reclassification of e-CNY toward a commercial bank deposit liability. The shift reads as an admission that zero-interest CBDC failed to attract voluntary adoption at scale. Whether this experiment succeeds, or triggers the deposit displacement that the entire CBDC community has worked to prevent, will provide the first empirical test of a question that has so far been addressed only through models and simulations.

Source documents: Monetary Policy Impact; Licensing Frameworks.

2.10 AML/CFT Compliance by Design Rather Than Bolt-On

The EU's N-XT settlement engine embeds compliance at the infrastructure level — the UTXO data model enables AML pattern detection without exposing individual identities to the central bank. The FATF classifies CBDC as fiat currency (not a virtual asset), meaning existing AML/CFT frameworks apply without requiring new regulatory categories. Tiered KYC — implemented by China (Category 1–4 wallets), Nigeria (Tier 0–3), India (basic vs full-KYC wallets), and the Bahamas (three-tier KYC) — allows low-value, lower-friction access while maintaining traceability for high-value transactions. Building compliance into the architecture from inception avoids the retrofit costs and user friction of bolt-on solutions.

The EDPB/EDPS Joint Opinion 02/2023 recommended a privacy threshold below which even online low-value transactions would not be traced for AML/CFT purposes — effectively creating a digital cash-like zone within the compliance architecture. This recommendation, if adopted in the final digital euro Regulation, would represent one of the most advanced integrations of privacy and compliance in any payment system globally. The principle is that compliance should be proportionate to risk: micro-transactions do not warrant the same scrutiny as large-value transfers, and over-compliance drives users away from the formal system entirely.

Source documents: Compliance & Enforcement; Privacy & Data Protection; Technology & Design Choices.

3. Mixed Results — The Jury Is Still Out

3.1 China's e-CNY: Scale Without Adoption

China's e-CNY is the world's largest CBDC by every absolute metric — 2.25 billion wallets (September 2025, multiple per user), 3.48 billion cumulative transactions worth CNY 16.7 trillion (November 2025), 26–29+ pilot cities. Yet the average transaction value declined from CNY 1,895 (2023) to CNY 428 (2025), suggesting incentive-driven rather than organic usage, and the instrument represented only about 0.16% of M0. The 1 January 2026 reclassification from M0/central bank liability toward a commercial bank deposit-money model — plus the introduction of 0.05% interest — represents a fundamental pivot that the Peterson Institute argues may mean e-CNY no longer qualifies as a CBDC. The April 2026 doubling of authorized operators to 22 reads as a transition from pilot toward full-scale deployment. Whether the reclassified instrument succeeds as a deposit product is a different question from whether it succeeds as a CBDC.

The reclassification also raises a taxonomic question for the global CBDC community. If the world's largest "CBDC" is reclassified toward a commercial bank deposit, what does this mean for the CBDC concept itself? The analysis suggests China effectively concluded that a pure central bank liability model could not achieve mass adoption, and pivoted to a deposit-money model with interest as an incentive. The BIS 2024 survey counted 91% of 93 central banks as "exploring CBDCs" — but China's pivot may signal that the M0 digital currency model has inherent adoption ceilings that no jurisdiction has yet overcome.

Source documents: Economic Outcomes; Monetary Policy Impact; Technology & Design Choices.

3.2 The EU's Comprehensive-but-Delayed Approach

The EU digital euro has the most sophisticated design framework of any CBDC — COM(2023) 369 legislation, EDPB/EDPS privacy analysis, EUR 3,000 holding limit modelling, the N-XT settlement engine, mandatory acceptance provisions, and detailed intermediary compensation structures. The preparation phase concluded in October 2025 and the Governing Council moved the project to its next phase on 29–30 October 2025; a 12-month PSP pilot is planned for H2 2027 and potential first issuance only in 2029 — by which time the stablecoin market (already USD 312–320 billion) may have established network effects that are difficult to displace. The legislative path remains live: the ECON Committee vote on the draft report is scheduled for 23 June 2026, and the assumption is adoption of the Regulation in 2026. Comprehensiveness and timeliness are in tension.

The EUR 1.3 billion development cost and EUR 320 million annual operating cost represent the most transparent CBDC cost disclosure globally. For the eurozone economy, these figures are manageable when funded through seigniorage. But the question is whether the digital euro will launch into a market where stablecoin network effects — particularly for cross-border remittances and DeFi integration — have already been established. The five coexistence models identified in the Stablecoin Coexistence guidance (displacement, parallel regulation, stablecoin-only, complementary, CBDC-backed stablecoin) all presuppose that the CBDC arrives in time to shape the market. A 2029 launch may be too late for some of these models to apply.

Source documents: Legal Framework & Authorization; Stablecoin Coexistence; Implementation Guide; Economic Outcomes.

3.3 Mandatory Bank Participation

The Bahamas mandated commercial bank participation in Sand Dollar distribution (announced July 2024, a two-year plan effective ~mid-2026) — nearly four years after launch. Russia plans mandatory participation as part of its 1 September 2026 large-scale launch (systemically important banks and large retailers first). Jamaica's BOJ publicly and repeatedly criticised banks for failing to invest in JAM-DEX merchant terminals, with the Governor in 2026 pressing banks to accelerate POS integration. The evidence shows that banks will not voluntarily distribute a product that cannibalizes their deposit base unless compelled to do so. But mandating participation without a viable compensation model creates resentful compliance rather than genuine investment. The EU's approach — mandating acceptance while designing a fee structure — is more balanced but untested.

The licensing dimension is also unresolved. No jurisdiction has created a standalone CBDC licence — all use extensions of existing banking, payment, or e-money licences. The EU's approach casts the widest net (all credit institutions and payment institutions under PSD2/PSD3). The UK's PIP/ESIP framework is the most bespoke but untested. The absence of a defined CBDC intermediary licence, with clear rights and obligations, means that intermediary compensation models remain undefined — and without defined compensation, mandatory participation creates an unfunded mandate.

Source documents: Licensing Frameworks; Monetary Policy Impact; Economic Outcomes.

3.4 India's e-Rupee Alongside UPI Dominance

India's Digital Rupee has roughly 7–8 million users and on the order of 200,000 daily transactions — negligible against UPI's 500+ million users and 20 billion monthly transactions. Its circulation actually contracted about 24% year-on-year to ₹771.7 crore (~US$90 million) as of 31 March 2026 (self-reported, RBI Annual Report 2025-26) — the first reported decline. But the RBI's strategic pivot toward programmable welfare (Gujarat G-SAFAL, AP DEEPAM 2.0, Puducherry PMGKAY) may carve a genuine niche that UPI cannot serve. If programmable government transfers achieve measurable efficiency gains over existing subsidy rails, India could demonstrate the first evidence-based retail CBDC use case at scale. The outcome depends entirely on whether programmability delivers concrete, measurable benefits that justify the infrastructure cost.

The circulation data tells a nuanced story. After 334% year-on-year growth to ₹1,016 crore reported in early 2025, the FY2025-26 contraction to ₹771.7 crore signals that incentive-driven growth was not self-sustaining once promotions eased. Only about 0.42% of India's population has an e₹ wallet, and the 200,000 daily transactions remain a rounding error against UPI's scale. The programmable welfare pivot is therefore not just a strategic choice but a necessity: the e₹ must find a use case where it is the only tool that works, because for every use case where UPI also works, UPI will win on network effects alone.

Source documents: Financial Inclusion; Economic Outcomes; Technology & Design Choices.

3.5 Interest-Bearing CBDC as Monetary Policy Tool

China broke with global orthodoxy by introducing a 0.05% interest rate on verified e-CNY wallets effective 1 January 2026, with the first quarterly payouts on 20 March 2026. If this modest rate attracts usage without destabilizing bank deposits, it could validate CBDC as a direct monetary policy transmission channel — a possibility the BIS and academic literature have explored theoretically but no jurisdiction had tested operationally. The counterargument is that even low positive rates, if raised during crises, could trigger rapid deposit migration; and the rate arrived bundled with a reclassification of e-CNY toward a deposit liability, confounding any clean read of the interest effect alone. It is far too early to assess outcomes, but China's experiment will generate the first real-world data on this question.

Source documents: Monetary Policy Impact; Economic Outcomes.

3.6 Offline Payment Capability

Every leading CBDC design recognises offline capability as critical — particularly for financial inclusion in areas with unreliable connectivity. The EU plans offline payments via secure elements on user devices (Giesecke+Devrient selected). Sweden tested an offline EMV card in e-Krona Phase 4 with SEK 3,000 balance caps and a maximum of 5 consecutive offline payments.

India officially launched offline NFC transactions for the e₹ at the Global Fintech Fest in October 2025. China has deployed dual-offline hardware wallets (SIM-card wallets, IC cards) and demonstrated them at the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Ghana's eCedi was designed offline-first to reach the ~47% of Ghanaians lacking internet access (a self-reported figure). Yet, with the partial exception of China, no jurisdiction has deployed offline CBDC at large production scale. The technical challenges — preventing double-spending without a network connection, managing deferred settlement, securing hardware wallets against tampering — remain substantial. Offline CBDC is the strongest differentiated use case for populations without reliable internet, but the technology is still close to prototype stage across most jurisdictions.

The unbanked adults who own mobile phones represent the addressable population for mobile-first offline CBDC. But reaching them requires hardware wallet distribution, agent network development, and user education at a scale that few CBDC programmes have attempted. The ECCB's conclusion — that a Fast Payment System achieves similar goals more reliably — may apply to online scenarios, but offline payments remain CBDC's more distinctive territory. Notably, Ghana declared its eCedi pilot "completed" on 22 May 2026 yet still has no enabling legislation and is now reframing toward wholesale and cross-border use — a reminder that even an offline-first design can stall. The question is whether any jurisdiction will invest the resources needed to prove the concept at production scale.

Source documents: Technology & Design Choices; Financial Inclusion.

4. Summary: The Evidence-Based Playbook

The following fifteen principles are distilled from the evidence across all eleven guidance documents and the 20 jurisdiction profiles. Each is grounded in specific jurisdictional data and observable outcomes. They are ordered by strength of evidence, from strongest (multiple jurisdictions, consistent outcomes) to emerging (single jurisdiction, early-stage data).

1. Legislate before you launch. Nigeria's 98.5% wallet inactivity and China's forced reclassification (1 January 2026) demonstrate that launching without a legal framework produces either public rejection or disruptive mid-course corrections. Jamaica's statutory legal tender designation and the EU's COM(2023) 369 provide the positive models.

2. Never coerce adoption. Nigeria's cash restriction campaign caused protests and bank attacks without driving CBDC usage. The Bahamas saw cash increase 20% despite Sand Dollar availability. Adoption must be earned through utility, not forced through restriction.

3. Design for privacy first, compliance second. The UK's legislative privacy guarantees and the EU's EDPB/EDPS-informed dual-tier architecture generate public trust. Russia's full-surveillance model produces 50%+ public unwillingness. Privacy is not a feature — it is a prerequisite for adoption.

4. Set holding limits based on rigorous modelling. The EU's EUR 3,000 limit and the UK's GBP 10,000–20,000 scenarios, both grounded in central bank staff research (including BoE Financial Stability Paper No. 53) and BIS Working Paper 1280, represent the gold standard for calibrating disintermediation risk.

5. Use two-tier distribution — there is no alternative. Every operational CBDC uses intermediaries for distribution. Direct central bank retail service is universally rejected as operationally infeasible and politically inappropriate.

6. Avoid single-vendor dependency. DCash's roughly two-month outage from expired certificates on a single vendor's platform is the cautionary benchmark — and the ECCB ultimately suspended its DCash 2.0 successor (February 2026). Multi-vendor strategies and open API architectures (UK Project Rosalind: 33 API functions) distribute risk.

7. Start with proven technology, not frontier research. Brazil's four-year ZKP failure — culminating in the November 2025 decommissioning of the Hyperledger Besu Drex platform and a rebuild "from scratch" — demonstrates the cost of building on immature technology. Centralised or hybrid architectures (China, EU N-XT) deliver production reliability; DLT can be layered in later if needed.

8. Build the merchant network before expecting consumer adoption. Jamaica's ~2,379 merchants and the Bahamas' thin business-wallet base show that without places to spend CBDC, holding it has no purpose. Merchant onboarding — including terminal subsidies and, where necessary, mandatory bank participation — must precede or accompany launch.

9. Find the use case that existing rails cannot serve. India's programmable welfare delivery and Singapore's Purpose-Bound Money protocol target specific gaps that UPI and conventional payment systems cannot fill. General-purpose-payments CBDC fails where efficient digital payment systems already exist (South Africa reached this conclusion explicitly in its November 2025 Position Paper).

10. Invest in multi-year consultation. The UK's 50,000+ consultation responses and the EDPB/EDPS Joint Opinion materially improved digital euro privacy design. Nigeria's 9-month fast-track produced a product no one wanted. Front-loading consultation is an investment, not a delay.

11. Prioritise wholesale cross-border CBDC where retail has not proven its case. mBridge's ~USD 55.5 billion in reported settlements, Australia's Project Acacia (A$4.4m wCBDC issued, final report 18 May 2026), Singapore's first live wholesale transaction (Nov 2025), and Canada's Project Samara bond settlement (Mar 2026) demonstrate concrete value. No retail CBDC has exceeded 0.5% of currency in circulation — the retail use case remains unproven at scale.

12. Plan for stablecoin coexistence, not displacement. The stablecoin market (USD 312–320 billion) is growing faster than any CBDC programme — and the US has bet on it outright via the GENIUS Act (PL 119-27). The EU's MiCA parallel regulation, Singapore's layered design, and the BIS Project Aurum CBDC-backed stablecoin model all treat stablecoins as complements. Delayed CBDC launch risks stablecoin lock-in that becomes irreversible.

13. Do not pay interest on retail CBDC — until you have overwhelming evidence to do so. The global consensus on non-remuneration is supported by BIS, IMF, and most central banks' own modelling. China's 0.05% interest experiment (effective January 2026, first payout March 2026) is an outlier whose results are not yet available and which arrived bundled with a deposit-money reclassification. The burden of proof is on interest-bearing advocates.

14. Build compliance into the architecture, not onto it. The EU's N-XT UTXO-based AML pattern detection and the FATF's classification of CBDC as fiat (not virtual asset) show that compliance is most effective when embedded in system design. Tiered KYC — allowing low-value, lower-friction access — balances inclusion with enforcement.

15. Accept that CBDC may not be necessary. The ECCB suspended DCash 2.0 in favour of a Fast Payment System (February 2026); South Africa concluded there is "no compelling immediate need" for a retail CBDC (November 2025); Canada scaled down retail CBDC work (September 2024). The World Bank asks directly whether CBDC is "the right tool" for financial inclusion. Brazil's Pix brought 71 million Brazilians into digital payments without CBDC; India's UPI serves 500+ million users. The honest assessment is that a well-designed fast payment system may deliver most of what retail CBDC promises, at lower cost and complexity.

Methodology Note

This assessment synthesises findings exclusively from the eleven Phase 2 CBDC guidance documents in this repository — Legal Framework & Authorization, Privacy & Data Protection, Monetary Policy Impact, Technology & Design Choices, Financial Inclusion, Cross-Border Interoperability, Stablecoin Coexistence, Licensing Frameworks, Compliance & Enforcement, Economic Outcomes, and Implementation Guide — together with the verified per-jurisdiction record for all 20 studied jurisdictions. No claims have been introduced beyond what is documented and sourced in those files. Adoption and transaction figures reported by issuing central banks are flagged as self-reported. Where data is limited, contested, or unverified, this is noted explicitly. The assessment reflects the evidence base as of 4 June 2026.

Wikilinks in this document follow first-mention-per-section conventions and are not used inside tables.

Key Quantitative Findings Across All Jurisdictions

The following data points recur throughout the analysis and represent the most robust quantitative findings (issuer-reported adoption/transaction figures are self-reported and flagged accordingly):

• 0.5% ceiling: No launched retail CBDC has exceeded 0.5% of currency in circulation (Bahamas ~0.39%, Nigeria ~0.37%, Jamaica ~0.1%, China ~0.16% of M0).
• 6 of 20 ever launched/live: Across the 20 studied jurisdictions, only the Bahamas, Nigeria, Jamaica, Eastern Caribbean (DCash, pilot concluded; successor suspended), China (large-scale pilot), and India (pilot) have reached a live or launched retail state.
• 98.5% inactivity: Nigeria's eNaira wallet inactivity rate, per IMF WP/23/104 (self-reported), is the worst documented, but the wallet-activity gap is universal.
• 20% cash increase: The Bahamas saw physical cash rise 20% despite Sand Dollar availability — contradicting assumptions about CBDC-driven cash reduction.
• ~USD 55.5 billion: mBridge's reported cross-border settlement total (self-reported, not independently audited) represents the strongest evidence of CBDC value in the wholesale domain.
• EUR 3,000 / GBP 10,000–20,000: The EU and UK holding-limit proposals represent the most rigorously modelled disintermediation safeguards.
• 50,000+ responses: The UK's digital pound consultation achieved the highest public engagement of any CBDC programme globally.
• CNY 1,895 to CNY 428: China's declining average e-CNY transaction value suggests incentive-driven rather than organic adoption.
• ₹771.7 crore, −24% YoY: India's e₹-R circulation as of 31 March 2026 (self-reported, RBI AR 2025-26) — the first reported year-on-year contraction for a launched retail CBDC.
• 71 million in 4 years: Brazil's Pix onboarded more previously excluded users than all CBDCs combined, without requiring a central bank digital currency.
• 9 months vs 9+ years: Nigeria's fast-track launch timeline versus the EU's deliberate timeline (2020 investigation to potential 2029 issuance) represents the extremes of implementation pace — and of outcome quality.
• 4 years: Brazil's Drex spent four years testing blockchain privacy solutions before the BCB decommissioned the Hyperledger Besu platform (10 November 2025) and rebuilt "from scratch."
• ~2 months: DCash's complete outage duration from expired Fabric certificates — the starkest illustration of single-vendor fragility; its DCash 2.0 successor was later suspended (February 2026).
• EUR 432.1 million: The EU's framework agreements with EU-controlled service providers for digital euro preparation (potential max EUR 1.164 billion) — distributing vendor risk.
• A$4.4 million: Wholesale CBDC issued in Australia's Project Acacia (final report 18 May 2026), across 8 of 20 use cases (12 pilot + 8 PoC).
• 22 operators: China's authorized e-CNY operator roster after 12 banks were added on 2 April 2026.
• 312–320 billion USD: The stablecoin market cap as of early 2026, growing faster than any CBDC programme and representing the competitive context for sovereign digital money.
• 300,000+ TPS: China's reported e-CNY throughput capacity (not independently verified), demonstrating that centralised architectures can achieve scale that DLT-based systems have not matched in production.
• 50%+: Percentage of Russian citizens reportedly unwilling to use the digital ruble (media-sourced, indicative), the highest documented public resistance to any CBDC programme.
• 0.05%: China's pioneering interest rate on verified e-CNY wallets (effective 1 January 2026, first payout 20 March 2026), the first break with global non-remuneration consensus.

Verification Notes

• Source of truth. This refresh mirrors the canonical per-jurisdiction fact record for all 20 jurisdictions. No fact has been introduced that is not in that record or already verified in this file. Items marked "NOT VERIFIED" in the source record are not asserted here as fact.
• Self-reported figures. Adoption metrics (wallet counts, circulation values) and transaction volumes are central-bank self-reported unless otherwise noted, and are flagged as such — notably the Bahamas (CBOB), Nigeria (CBN/IMF), Jamaica (BOJ), China (PBOC), India (RBI), and Russia (CBR). China's mBridge settlement and TPS figures and Australia's A$24bn/yr Acacia estimate are self-reported and not independently audited.
• Launch-status precision (N=20). Live/launched retail: Bahamas Sand Dollar, Nigeria eNaira, Jamaica JAM-DEX, India e₹ (pilot), China e-CNY (large-scale pilot). Discontinued/suspended: Eastern Caribbean DCash (pilot concluded Jan 2024; DCash 2.0 suspended 13 Feb 2026). Anti-CBDC: United States (EO 14178 in force; statutory ban passed both chambers in differing, unreconciled forms — not enacted). Pilot/preparation/research: all others (e.g., EU preparation phase concluded Oct 2025, ECON vote 23 Jun 2026, potential 2029 issuance; UK design phase, no launch decision; Russia legally-mandated 1 Sep 2026 launch, narrow government use live since 1 Jan 2026; Sweden research-only; South Africa no compelling immediate need; Canada scaled down; Australia/Singapore/Thailand/South Korea/Japan wholesale or hybrid; Ghana pilot "completed" May 2026 but unlaunched).
• Key fact refreshes this cycle. US GENIUS Act = S.1582 / PL 119-27 and CBDC moratorium not enacted; Brazil's Besu platform decommissioned 10 Nov 2025 (MP 1303 lapsed 8 Oct 2025); Canada's Stablecoin Act received Royal Assent 26 Mar 2026 (not yet in force); China at 22 operators and 0.05% interest; India e₹-R ₹771.7 crore (−24% YoY); ECB preparation phase concluded Oct 2025; Australia's Project Acacia final report 18 May 2026; Ghana eCedi pilot "completed" 22 May 2026; South Africa Position Paper 27 Nov 2025.