a research desk, not a newsroom
Central bank digital currencies are the most consequential — and most misunderstood — development in money since the credit card. More than 130 countries have explored a CBDC. The EU is moving toward a 2027 digital euro pilot. The United States has gone the opposite direction and is trying to ban one outright. And underneath the policy noise, a quieter question keeps coming up in institutional circles: if state-backed digital money ever ships at scale, what does it actually run on?
What a CBDC actually is, how CBDCs differ from stablecoins, the real pros and cons central banks weigh, and the plumbing concepts — wholesale vs retail designs, programmable money, and tokenized deposits — that the debate actually turns on.
Not breathless news, just verified status: where the digital euro really stands after the ECB closed its preparation phase, why the US digital dollar is effectively banned, how India’s digital rupee pilot is scaling, and what the rest of the world is shipping. Every page carries a “last verified” date and cites primary sources — BIS, IMF, the ECB, Congress.gov — not other blogs.
The domain name isn’t an accident. Solana has become the highest-velocity settlement layer for regulated digital dollars: roughly $650 billion in stablecoin transfer volume in February 2026 alone, Visa clearing US bank transactions in USDC on Solana, and R3 bringing its regulated-asset business to the network. Whether a central bank would ever issue on a public chain is a genuinely open question — we examine it honestly.
Everything here is written and maintained by Daniel Voss, a payments and fintech research analyst. No sponsored content, no token shilling, no AI-generated filler — read the editorial standards we hold ourselves to.