CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency)
Government-issued digital money — sharing technology vocabulary with crypto but the opposite philosophy: centralized by design.
A CBDC is a digital form of national currency issued directly by a central bank. Over a hundred countries have researched them; China’s e-CNY is the largest live deployment, while the US has legislatively pushed back against a retail digital dollar and leaned toward regulated private stablecoins instead.
Despite the shared “digital currency” label, CBDCs invert crypto’s core idea: they are centralized, permissioned and programmable by the issuer. The debate around them — payment efficiency and inclusion versus surveillance and control over how money can be spent — is really a debate about what money should know about you.