LIST | A Look at 6 Global CBDC Projects and Challenges Facing CBDC Adoption Across the World

To date, three jurisdictions have launched a nation-wide CBDC:

• The Bahamas
• Jamaica, and
• Nigeria

while others including:

• Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU)
• Ghana
• China, and
• India

are conducting pilots.

Among the countries that have already launched CBDCs or are conducting large-scale pilots, adoption remains slow and limited, IMF has determined.

In notes published in September 2024 by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the institution compiled the challenges facing CBDC adoption in these markets:

1.) eNaira (Nigeria)

In Nigeria, the slowness in eNaira uptake can be partially attributed to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s phased approach – initially granting access only to customers with bank accounts and restricting eNaira

transactions to domestic usage only.

According to the paper, 98.5 percent of eNaira wallets were unused one year after its launch, suggesting that the bulk of the wallet holders were inactive.

2.) Sand Dollar (Bahamas)

The Central Bank of the Bahamas identified several factors contributing to the Sand Dollar’s relatively low adoption, including a lack of merchant participation in the Sand Dollar network and lack of integration with the traditional banking system for merchant accounts.

Moreover, banks and credit unions exhibited slow engagement with the Sand Dollar project, and there were shortcomings in customer education, with users not adequately informed about the benefits and usage of the Sand Dollar.

3.) DCash (Eastern Caribbean Currency Union)

The ECCU’s DCash has faced shortcomings in user education, as consumers were not presented with clear use cases for DCash.

Additionally, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank acknowledged its initial lack of oversight in developing the merchant network adequately, as its initial efforts were concentrated on DCash system development rather than on its practical implementation and usage.

Furthermore, the lack of integration of DCash with merchant point-of-sale (POS) devices and ECCU’s legacy financial systems contributed to its lower adoption among merchants. Lastly, a two-month system outage, coupled with the lack of timely communication from the central bank on the recovery timeline, further hurt confidence in DCash among users.

The DCash pilot was stopped in January 2024 to allow for transition to DCash 2.0.8.

4.) Jam-Dex (Jamaica)

In Jamaica, low adoption rates of the Jam-Dex were attributed to insufficient public education and challenges in onboarding merchants.

Merchants were initially required to upgrade POS devices to accept Jam-Dex. Moreover, the lack of incentivization or mandate for commercial banks to modify ATMs for JamDex conversion also posed challenges to adoption efforts.

5.) e-CNY (China)

China’s e-CNY is the largest CBDC pilot worldwide in terms of amount of currency in circulation and number of users. Various use cases have been implemented, including public transportation, retirement benefits, school tuition, and tax payments.

The e-CNY is available in multiple provinces, with 16.5 billion Yuan in circulation and 120 million wallets opened as of June 2023.11 At 0.16 percent of China’s money supply (which includes physical currency in circulation and bank reserves), the e-CNY is still far from competing with privately-owned payment apps, such as AliPay and WeChat Pay.

6.) Digital Rupee (India)

The digital Rupee pilot has yet to achieve mainstream adoption among India’s vast population, especially in the presence of the widely adopted Unified Payments Interface (UPI).

As of May 2024, the e-Rupee in circulation stood at 3.23 billion rupees, up from 1 billion rupees in December 2023. However, this remains a small fraction of the 35.4 trillion rupees in banknotes currently in circulation.