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SIX presents seven possible futures for money, in both its physical and digital form. The scenarios focus on Switzerland but continuing discussions will also take us beyond its borders. What is considered money, what form it takes, and how it is used, all look set to change dramatically in the near future.

The potential role of a DLT-based wholesale CBDC is in worth considering if not desirable according to the Banque de France's Denis Beau, and the central bank is quite open for experiments in that direction, together with the ECB and other central banks of the Eurosystem.

"In Japan, the amount of cash outstanding is still increasing, and it does not seem that there is a demand for CBDC from the public at present. Nevertheless, the Bank of Japan has been conducting technical and legal research on this matter in order to stand ready when the need for CBDC may arise in the future."

The Banco Central del Uruguay committed to continuing its analysis and study of central bank digital currency issuance (CBDC) in its 2020-2022 national payment systems roadmap.

A research arm of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority published a detailed report, based on an industry-wide survey, on overall Fintech adoption and the latest technological advancements in the banking sector. Banks see Fintech development more as an opportunity than a threat to their business operations, with risk management services having the greatest potential. Meanwhile, 86% of banks have adopted or plan to adopt Fintech solutions across all types of financial services. Preliminary results also show that increased cost efficiency and improved profitability are associated with more extensive Fintech adoption by banks.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) announced the three winners of the G20 TechSprint challenge. The hackathon-style competition was launched in April 2020 to highlight the potential for technology to resolve regulatory compliance (regtech) and supervisory (suptech) challenges. The winners, chosen by an independent panel of experts, addressed one or more of its three problem topics. FNA won the dynamic information-sharing category for their solution FNA Platform for Dynamic Information Sharing and Real-Time Analytics, Tookitaki won in the monitoring and surveillance category for their solution Crypto-currency AML Typology Repository Management and ISDA-REGnosys won the regulatory reporting challenge for their solution Consistent Regulatory Reporting via the Common Domain Model.

"The past year has been a year of exciting initiatives for Ghana's digital infrastructure. The Government has adopted digitization as a key policy objective and has recently introduced a number of programs designed to develop a more digitally accessible public sector and encourage transparency and efficiency, in order to drive growth in all aspects of the country's economy."

A detailed report and solution for India by Policy 4.0. to tackle the spectrum of regulatory risks the government faces with cryptocurrency. The report outlines a comprehensive policy risk framework for India with cryptocurrency and recommends India build its own "India wallet" to tackle KYC, the inflow and outflow of cryptocurrency and monetary concerns.

This Deloitte paper advocates for combining the best attributes of crypto-asset technology with the features of an established fiat currency under the sponsorship of a central bank? However, to me it sounds like they're describing a central bank-issued fiat-pegged stablecoin running on a private permissioned distributed ledger technology-based network. Am I missing something, because this just sounds like a fairly generic central bank digital currency?

"Visa's CBDC Payments Module is a proof-of-concept (POC) that envisions bringing web3 assets into a web2 user experience by providing an on-ramp for individuals, business owners, governments, and users of all kinds. The POC is designed to be a bridge connecting a CBDC system with existing forms of payment products and outlets. In linking CBDC with card payments-whether in the form of prepaid or debit cards-CBDC becomes a fast and nearly ubiquitous alternative payment choice users can easily adopt alongside existing forms of money, all while benefiting from economies of scale derived from today's mature payment networks. The illustration below captures the flow of a payment transaction that integrates Visa's scale and messaging protocols with a participating central bank's ledger technology. Importantly, all this is designed to happen at the backend without major disruption for users, businesses, and financial intermediaries."

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and Bank Indonesia announced the 21 shortlisted finalists for the G20 TechSprint CBDC challenge. The shortlisted teams now have until the end of August to complete their prototypes, which will then be judged by an independent expert panel convened by Bank Indonesia. Winners for each of the three categories will be announced in October ahead of the G20 Summit. Among the shortlisted were BitMint, R3, Ripple, S.e.A. (Stellar, eCurrency and ANZ), Bitt-IDEMIA, Crunchfish, and Giesecke+Devrient (G+D) Filia.

The BIS Innovation Hub's Swiss Centre launched Project Tourbillon to explore how to reconcile central bank digital currency (CBDC) design trade-offs between cyber resiliency, scalability and privacy. For example, higher resiliency against cyber-attacks requires additional cryptography, which can slow down payment processing. Privacy must be weighed against the need to counter money laundering, terrorism financing and other illicit payments. Project Tourbillon aims to reconcile these trade-offs by combining proven technologies such as blind signatures and mix networks with the latest research on cryptography and CBDC design suggested by David Chaum and Thomas Moser in a 2021 Swiss National Bank working paper. The conclusions of this project will be relevant for both wholesale and retail CBDC systems. The goal is to finish the prototype by mid-2023.

The Bank of England's Andrew Hauser argues that a central bank digital currency (CBDC) could have a big impact on the the size, composition and risk profile of the central bank's balance sheets; for the monetary policy transmission mechanism, and for monetary control. He argues for the need to understand these impacts, and build them into the design of CBDCs and central bank operational toolkits.

"As a young global professional at the GeoEconomics Center, my research has focused on the evolution of central bank digital currencies. In November, I traveled to Nigeria, where I had the opportunity to see eNaira in action. In my experience, using eNaira's Speed Wallet was fairly simple. Once I obtained the necessary information from my personal bank, I was easily able to register for the Speed Wallet, and did not experience any of the issues that were reported during the initial launch of the CBDC, such as technical bugs for new users trying to register. "

Bank for International Settlements (BIS) General Manager Agustín Carstens called for  the development of a  "unified ledger" that would allow different parts of the digital financial ecosystem to work together seamlessly. More specifically, such a ledger could bundled together central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tokenized deposits, linked with smart contracts, to create a "money Lego" ecosystem. And Mr. Carstens claimed that all of a unified ledger's potential benefits  could be achieved on permissioned platforms with various degrees of centralization.

The Banque de France in partnership with HSBC and IBM demonstrated the use of a wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) to enable transactions across borders and technology platforms whilst facilitating the lifecycle of digital assets and currencies in wholesale markets. A combined proof of concept tested the issuance and distribution of a CBDC, bond subscription in primary and secondary markets followed by coupon redemption, and execution of cross border and cross network payments. It proved that each transaction flowed correctly through the network of systems, automatically triggering the required events, whilst retaining visibility and control over the CBDC in circulation.

The Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) is reportedly operationalizing its domestic digital dirham central bank digital currency (CBDC). It is encouraging all UAE commercial banks and payments processors to participate in a pilot integration with the CBUAE digital dirham issuing node and has decreed digital dirham adoption by all UAE licensed financial institutions (LSIs) by 2026. In the immediate term, those LSIs are being encouraged to develop digital dirham use cases in the CBUAE sandbox.

The Bank of Thailand (BOT) published an update on its retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot testing. Although the pilot successfully demonstrated the potential of the technology behind the retail CBDC system, the BOT said it has no plans to launch one and will use the technology design to further develop a more efficient payment system in the future. I'd like to say more about the paper, but it's supposedly written in Thai, although Google Translate doesn't seem to think so, and just returns gibberish.

The Bank of Thailand (BOT) published an English version of its update on its retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) technical testing. The original version was published in late March 2024 in Thai and, because Google Translate was returning gibberish, I wasn't able to ascertain whether the latest work was a pilot or proof of concept (POC). However, according to the new document, it is clearly a proof of concept because the 4,000 individual users that participated were employees of the BOT and the three intermediaries that took part. In any case, the POC successfully demonstrated the potential of the technology behind the retail CBDC system, but the BOT said it has no plans to launch one and will use the technology design to further develop a more efficient payment system.