Finding a Role for Retail CBDC

John Kiff, who writes as Kiffmeister, has written a series of papers considering the future of retail Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) . He started by analysing the CBDCTracker.org database to see what has been happening to CBDC over time. His first findings were that projects are not leading to launches. Some projects have been put on the backburner and some cancelled, never getting out of the research or proof-of-concept phases. Many central banks have refocused to wholesale CBDC-backed tokenised deposits.

Reasons CBDC have made slow progress

There are, of course, multiple reasons for what has happened. Many retail CBDCs are made redundant by payment ecosystems that are already well served by digital payment instruments, such as fast payment systems (FPSs).