Austria’s central bank (OeNB) hosted on 8 July a forum open to all about the digital euro and payments. It focused on the current challenges and opportunities of the digital euro which it presents as a common, European solution for payment transactions. It focused on the current challenges and opportunities of the digital euro which it presents as a common, European solution for payment transactions.

In an Act about housing supply, the US Senate included a ban on the Federal Reserve issuing or creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC), or any substantially similar distributed ledger technology (DLT) based digital asset, until the end of 2030, including via intermediaries. The bill now goes back to the House of Representatives.

Ryozo Himino, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Japan, recently spoke about the singleness of money and the role of central banks. In his speech he noted the divergent approaches being taken by the US and Europe (GENIUS Act and the digital euro), stating that they may not serve as a model for Japan to follow given that they are heading in different directions, limiting the room for global consensus standards to emerge. Also, unlike the dollar, the yen is not the world’s key currency and Japan is an individual nation state with its own currency that is not a tool for regional integration.

18 months after the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) exited the mBridge cross-border project and launched Project Agorá, the fragmentation of cross-border payments has become almost institutionalised.

Norges Bank has now published four reports that led it to conclude in December 2025 that introducing a CBDC was currently not warranted.

A recent article in the Jamaica Observer focuses on Jamaica’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), known as Jam-Dex . Unusually not only does the article argue for increased usage of the CBDC, but it gives detailed suggestions for how to do this.

John Kiff, who writes as Kiffmeister, has written a series of papers considering the future of retail Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). He started by analysing the CBDCTracker.org database to see what has been happening to CBDC over time. His first findings were that projects are not leading to launches. Some projects have been put on the backburner and some cancelled, never getting out of the research or proof-of-concept phases. Many central banks have refocused to wholesale CBDC-backed tokenised deposits.

The US Senate has voted 89 to 10 to ban the Federal Reserve from issuing CBDCs until after 2030 as part of a bipartisan housing bill. The bill now moves to the House of Representatives.

The European Union Parliament has approved the digital euro initiative, reaching agreement with the European Council on creating a currency that will function both online and offline.

A two part IMF blog by Biagio Bossone and Massimo Costa seeks to reframe how central bank money, banknotes, reserves, and CBDCs are regarded, moving them from being seen as a debt to equity for the issuer and as custodial assets for the holders.