The planned rollout of a planet-wide network of “interoperable” digital currencies has shifted gears this year.
Digital Currency is still the endgame, but – in keeping with the spirit of the age – it seems they are changing the method to create the illusion of sides and choices.
We covered this briefly our most recent This Week in the New Normal, but it’s worth a deeper dive.
For years now OffG (and many others in the alternative media sphere) have covered the plans for programmable digital currency as a means for technocratic social control. This goal is years old, but first came to real prominence in the wake of the Covid “pandemic” and the attempted re-shaping of our entire society that entailed.
From 2020 to 2023, the development of “central bank digital currencies” (CBDCs) around the world was a steady upward line, reaching its peak when 130+ of the 197 nations on the planet, representing over 98% of the world’s economic output, were in the process of developing their own CBDC.
But then things went quiet, and some nations – including Japan and Canada – announced they would no longer be moving forward with their CBDC.
Why that would be I couldn’t say, except to speculate that concerns about control and privacy became too widely publicized, and market research indicated too much public scepticism to proceed.
Evidence for this can be found in the FinTech article “Bank of Canada Puts CBDC Development on Ice: Is This Indicative of Global CBDC Demise?”, from September 2024:
“The truth is that people don’t really want CBDCs,” says Stuart Connolly, CIO at investment and operating company Deus X Capital. He explains that concerns about freedom and privacy are still rife when it comes to CBDCs. “They have been roundly rejected by the business and crypto communities, and privacy advocates have campaigned against them because they are best suited to authoritarian economies where transparency can infringe upon freedoms and the creation of money and wealth are heavily controlled. Ultimately, there are few benefits to CBDCs and they simply aren’t compelling.”
That’s just an opinion of one man, of course, but it does jive with my instinctive feeling – CBDCs got too much bad press, and a shift in tactics was needed.
This brings us to 2025. There has been more movement on the CBDC front this year.
On April 9th the EU published the final draft of its “Digital Euro Bill”, and then just a few days ago, the European Central Bank announced a deal with 70 corporate trading partners to test “usage cases” for digital Euro transactions.
In the UK, the Bank of England is testing out offline payment systems for the Digital Pound.
Canada just *ahem* “elected” Mark Carney as their new Prime Minister, and while the Bank of Canada allegedly “scaled down” work on its CBDC last year, Carney has expressed very clear pro-CBDC thoughts in the past. It wouldn’t be shocking to see it restarted in a new “elbows up, look at us standing up to Donald Trump” context.
Indeed, that’s now the heart of the CBDC story.
Hellbound and Down 