The capacity to issue and evolve the currency itself: the cash cycle, fast payment instruments and central bank digital money, the frontier on which monetary sovereignty is now contested.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Currency Issuance & Digital Money as it stands today.
Finland's central bank launched Avant, a stored-value electronic money card, decades before the term CBDC came into use. It is cited as an early precedent for central bank issued digital money.
China's central bank started investigating a central bank digital currency, among the earliest major-economy programmes. The effort placed China at the front of the sovereign digital money frontier.
Ecuador's central bank ran a mobile payment scheme for four years before closing it. It is among the earliest state-run digital money experiments and an early example of discontinuation.
Ukrainian authorities focused on how a CBDC could draw deposits away from commercial banks. The concern shaped policy design debates about financial stability.
Australia's central bank tokenised syndicated loans in a wholesale CBDC trial using Ethereum. The project tested automation and security for high-value interbank transactions.
British authorities set out a cautious timeline for a state-backed digital pound. The announcement contrasted with Switzerland's more sceptical stance at the same time.
Brazil's central bank started rolling out pilot tests of a digital version of its currency. Drex became one of the larger emerging-economy CBDC programmes.
After a two-year investigation, the European Central Bank advanced the digital euro towards potential issuance. The decision committed the eurozone to building the groundwork for sovereign digital money.
By this point central banks representing 98% of world GDP were at some stage of assessing a CBDC. The Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria had already launched live systems.
Section 1101 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act barred the Federal Reserve from issuing a digital asset that is a direct liability of the Fed and widely available to the public. The measure foreclosed a retail US CBDC, echoing subnational bans such as Florida's on privacy grounds.