Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker
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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: July 2025
Key findings
137 countries & currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are exploring a CBDC. In May 2020 that number was only 35. Currently, 72 countries are in the advanced phase of exploration—development, pilot, or launch.
There is a new high of 49 CBDC pilot projects around the world. 3 countries have fully launched a digital currency—the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Nigeria. All three countries are focused on expanding the reach of their CBDCs domestically.
Emerging markets are driving global retail CBDC growth to reduce cash use, enhance financial inclusion, and improve regulatory oversight. This trend is also a response to the growing proliferation of US dollar-backed stablecoins internationally.
The ECB is advancing a “global euro moment” as it pilots the digital euro, aiming to strengthen the euro’s international role.Similarly, the PBoC is promoting the digital yuan as part of its strategy for a multipolar currency system. Both efforts signal a competitive push toward currency internationalization through CBDCs.
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.
India’s e-rupee is now the second-largest CBDC pilot. Digital rupee in circulation rose to ₹10.16 billion ($122 million) by March 2025, up 334% from ₹2.34 billion ($28 million) in 2024. In 2025, the Reserve Bank of India is expanding both retail and wholesale CBDCs with new use cases, offline functionality, and broader participation.
The US is an outlier amongst its peer central banks. In 2025, President Trump issued an executive order to halt all work on a retail CBDC, making the US the only country to do so. However, the US continues to engage in wholesale cross-border payments research through Project Agorá, an initiative in collaboration with six other major central banks.
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 now managed by the participating central banks, without BIS involvement.
Countries prefer to take a phased approach to piloting their CBDCs. They use controlled environments like regulatory sandboxes to gradually test and scale implementation. This progressive rollout allows them to assess technological resilience, address privacy and security concerns, evaluate user adoption, and ensure interoperability with existing financial systems.
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, Ethan Garcia
Contributions from: Nitya Biyani, Stefan de Villiers, Matt Goodman, Niels Graham, Leila Hamilton,William Howlett, Amy Jeon, Grace Kim,Reddy Lee, Roberto Lopez-Irizarry, Abhinav Vishwanath, Varsha Shankar, Greg Brownstein, Jessie Yin, and Phillip Meng.
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