CBDC & digital-money tracking

Open Advanced / Investigate → CBDC & Digital Money. The tracking dashboard brings together reviewed project evidence, BIS survey vintages, dated milestones, reported pilot measurements, source changes and global private-token captures. Use Workspace view to choose a dataset, Expand data for a wider reading area, and Full screen for the complete map workspace. Country, source, project and date filters, Refresh and Export selection are available under Layers → All controls. Data shows or hides the reading panel; its Workspace view selector and Expand data button stay directly accessible.

Start with the question you want to answer

• What is a central bank actually doing? Choose Retail CBDCs, Wholesale money, Cross-border or a country dossier. Inspect the project and its primary source.
• How has CBDC research changed globally? Choose BIS survey trends. The included survey years are 2020–2024, published 2021–2025. Each publication's own cohort, denominator and reported percentage are retained.
• What happened, and when? Choose Milestones & targets. An observed launch, completed test, report publication, framework-effective date and announced future target are different record types.
• How much activity is actually reported? Choose Reported scale & usage. Pilot institutions, use cases, transactions and test values are not active-user adoption statistics. Units, period precision and approximation flags are shown.
• What needs checking? Choose What changed or BIS updates. A changed webpage or a discovered link does not automatically change a project stage.
• What has changed in the private-token market? Compare Stablecoin market, Market history and Token history. Search a token name or symbol. Historical observations begin with actual captures; the application does not invent a backfill.

BIS survey trends

The 2024 report states 85 respondents were exploring retail CBDC, wholesale CBDC, or both. These are survey engagement measures, not counts of launched currencies or shares of the world population using one. Cohorts and questionnaires vary; the series preserves each report's original vintage rather than treating it as a constant panel. A percentage decline does not necessarily mean fewer central banks are doing work. This is the latest included survey vintage, not a claim that every subsequent BIS publication has been ingested.

Original reports: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024. Source: Bank for International Settlements. Original BIS material is freely available from those links. Watchtower is not endorsed by or affiliated with BIS.

Programme status and liability type

Retail CBDCs are central-bank liabilities intended for households or businesses. Wholesale central-bank settlement, commercial-bank deposit tokens, private stablecoins and cross-border prototypes are distinct. A payment-system link or prototype must not be presented as a launched retail CBDC.

Examples of the distinctions retained in this edition:

• Pontes: the ECB reports an initial 21 September 2026 launch for eligible wholesale participants, linking market DLT platforms and TARGET Services. Final settlement is in T2. This is separate from the proposed retail digital euro.
• Appia: the Eurosystem's March 2026 roadmap targets a blueprint by 2028. A future research deliverable is not an issuance date.
• Helvetia: the SNB announced continued wholesale-CBDC piloting until at least mid-2027. It explicitly says this is not a commitment to permanent issuance. Historical BIS phases and the newer SNB pilot are separate records.
• Aurum Phase 2: privacy-enhancing digital-cash research, published 13 October 2026. The exploratory prototype does not establish an issued Hong Kong retail CBDC.
• Mandala: programmable-compliance research; project partners are not automatically CBDC issuers. Rosalind and Mariana remain completed experiments.
• Digital Tenge: the recovered official English archive documents the 2023 first implementation phase; that archive alone does not establish current 2026 usage.
• IMF–FSB/FSB: international policy recommendations and implementation reviews are not domestic legislation, currency launches or licences for individual issuers.

Reported measurements

Agorá's source describes controlled real-value testing in July 2026. It reports 28 combined financial institutions and central banks, 17 scenarios, 30 transactions, approximately CHF 800,000 equivalent and approximately 80 seconds average initiation- to-settlement time under the stated prototype conditions. These are not production throughput, 28 central banks, recurring payment volume or a service-level guarantee. The aggregate CHF equivalent must not be added to its underlying currency subtotals.

RBI's 1 October 2026 FAQ reports 19 banks offering retail-CBDC wallets, 16 wholesale pilot participants and four wholesale use cases. These are participant/design counts, not wallet users, balances or nationwide penetration.

Each measurement includes its project/source, original unit, reporting period, precision, approximation flag, qualification and source link. A month-level event remains a month-level event; no arbitrary day is inserted.

What changed, discovery and review history

The existing 15-minute worker checks which sources are due. Primary pages and reviewed PDF byte digests are checked daily. Main-content extraction removes navigation and other page furniture before hashing. An extractor-version change is labelled parser revision, not a source or policy event. Available old-parser sources get one version-driven recheck; denied/paused sources retain their pauses.

What changed preserves earlier detections and adds source titles, publisher project labels, affected projects and lost-anchor information where available. Detection time is when the collector noticed a difference, not its legal-effective date. Changed evidence withholds the current rating until reviewed.

BIS updates discovers relevant links in the latest page of the BIS project listing. It is bounded listing coverage, not every BIS publication. Links are labelled discovered/not reviewed; no project stage is inferred from a headline.

Review history distinguishes retained and current editorial editions. The capture of an earlier installed record is not a reconstructed historical event. Automated collection never renews an editorial review date or promotes a stage.

Ratings, country mapping and missing evidence

The existing maturity bands remain M1 research 20, M2 design/prototype 40, M3 controlled pilot 60, M4 limited operation 80 and M5 operational product 100. They are ordinal deployment bands, not readiness percentages, probabilities, privacy/safety evaluations, credit ratings or investment recommendations.

Country ratings use eligible explicitly mapped projects within one money track. Research-only prototypes and roadmaps are excluded from national deployment ratings. Monetary-union projects count once globally. A stablecoin's peg currency, a research partner or an observer does not establish domestic adoption.

Editorial review expires after 90 days; source availability after seven days. Missing, expired, future-dated or changed evidence is qualified explicitly and may withhold a rating/value. The last reviewed number can remain visible in original fields as a dated reference; it must not be relabelled verified/current. Grey or unreported does not mean zero, safe, no-development or evidence of absence.

The original CBDC/cashless-controls analysis remains in its labelled legacy section. Its heuristic and forecasting inputs are separate from this maturity index.

Stablecoin capture history

The existing shared Crypto normalizer and DeFiLlama public catalogue remain the market source. Current rows expire after six hours. The digital-money worker reuses newer shared observations and respects existing provider pauses/backoff.

• Aggregate history retains up to 90 days / 2,160 observations.
• Token history retains up to seven days / 72 observations, up to 500 priced token records per capture. Unpriced/out-of-bound records are disclosed as omitted.
• Timestamps describe source retrieval, not necessarily a trade or issuance time.
• USD valuations, token units and prices remain separate. Native token supplies are never summed across currencies. Economic exposures can overlap between provider rows; aggregate valuations are not national money supply.
• No synthetic past observations, flat-line gap fills, reserve certification or implied redemption guarantee. Fewer than two captures cannot establish a trend.

Filters, export and Pro Brief

Use country, project, source and date filters where applicable. Global survey and market datasets remain global even if a country is selected. Date filters use the view's displayed event, publication, detection or source-capture time basis.

Export selection downloads the complete selected dataset with source and methodology fields. Pagination uses a native snapshotVersion; changed evidence returns HTTP 409 and prevents mixed-snapshot exports.

Open a project → Put project in Pro Brief to retain its exact project ID via the existing account-private board writer. You stay in CBDC & Digital Money. This does not create or enable an alert. Account/replay transitions cancel late actions. Source dates and review qualifications remain part of the saved view.

Coverage and troubleshooting

This edition contains 46 project/framework records, 49 official/issuer source definitions, five BIS survey vintages, eight reported measurements and eight explicit milestones. Counts of qualified ratings, source changes and market records vary with source freshness and subsequent observations.

Direct-source gaps remain visible, including blocked pages, JavaScript-only content and countries requiring newer primary evidence. The IMF CBDC Virtual Handbook request returned403; the joint IMF–FSB synthesis is available from the FSB. Blocked sources are not bypassed. Old project participation is not substituted for missing current domestic evidence.

If a source is marked changed, open it and read the current material. If an export reports a changed snapshot, refresh the selection and export again. Normal same-account background verification preserves the existing map instance; genuine account changes, denial and replay still clear protected context.