Most of the new Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) will emerge in the retail space, where eleven central banks could join peers in the Bahamas, the Eastern Caribbean, Jamaica and Nigeria which already run live digital retail currencies, the BIS found in its survey of 86 central banks conducted late 2022.
On the wholesale side, which in future could allow financial institutions to access new functionalities thanks to tokenisation, nine central banks could launch CBDCs, the BIS said.
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“Enhancing cross-border payments is among the key drivers of central banks’ work on wholesale CBDCs,” the authors of the report wrote.
The Swiss National Bank said in late June it would issue a wholesale CBDC on Switzerland’s digital exchange as part of a pilot, while the European Central Bank is on track to begin its digital euro pilot ahead of a possible launch in 2028. Pilot testing in China now reaches 260 million people and two other big emerging economies, India and Brazil, plan to launch digital currencies next year.