Central banks, private issuers, and international bodies are all racing to define what money looks like next. This program tracks central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoins, and tokenized settlement infrastructure as they reshape monetary sovereignty.
The Future of Money program monitors how central banks and private-sector issuers are redesigning the plumbing of money — from retail CBDCs aimed at everyday consumers, to wholesale settlement systems used between institutions, to dollar-backed stablecoins operating outside the traditional banking system entirely.
The most established benchmark in this space is the Atlantic Council's Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker, which as of its most recent update found 146 countries and currency unions exploring a CBDC, with 77 in advanced stages and only three — the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Nigeria — having fully launched one. Quad Institute's own CBDC Tracker will apply a comparable phase-based methodology, with added focus on Indo-Pacific coordination given our regional office presence.
Whoever sets the technical and regulatory standards for digital money will shape cross-border payments, sanctions enforcement, and financial surveillance capacity for decades. A country absent from that standard-setting process — as the United States currently is on retail CBDC — risks ceding first-mover advantage to rivals actively building alternative settlement rails.
Each country is classified as research, pilot, launched, or cancelled/inactive, updated on a rolling basis from central bank disclosures and Quad Institute field research.
Multilateral wholesale CBDC initiatives are tracked separately, with participating countries and settlement volume where publicly disclosed.
Given our New Delhi and Tokyo offices, the tracker will include expanded detail on Indo-Pacific CBDC coordination not always captured elsewhere.