By: Sauradeep Bag
The following excerpt is from Chapter 8 — Digital Currencies: From Idea to Implementation of ORF Global Quarterly: Energy and Tech: Powering the Future.
For much of the past decade, scholarly and policy discourse on digital currencies has remained largely prospective. Central banks commissioned feasibility studies, launched pilot programmes, and often deferred implementation, while proponents and sceptics alike debated futures untested at scale. Today, with 146 countries, representing 98 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), exploring or developing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and 11 BRICS nations pursuing similar initiatives, the central question is no longer whether sovereign digital money will emerge but what institutional form it will take, who will govern it, and whose economic interests it will serve.
Concurrently, a parallel transformation has advanced with less institutional fanfare. The emergence of privately issued stablecoins, now subject to comprehensive regulation by a major economy for the first time, is restructuring the architecture of global payments in ways that central bank frameworks neither fully anticipated nor have adequately addressed.
Two distinct but intersecting trends define the current landscape. The first is the uneven progress of CBDCs, technically ambitious yet politically complex. The second is the rapid institutionalisation of dollar-pegged stablecoins, accelerated by the passage of the United States GENIUS Act in July 2025, which has transformed these instruments from reputational risks into regulated financial infrastructure. In 2024, stablecoin transfer volume surged to US$27.6 trillion, more than Visa and Mastercard combined. That figure alone signals that the centre of gravity in digital currency has shifted from government-led experiments to market-driven reality.
Digital currencies are moving from experimentation to implementation, shifting attention towards governance, regulation and the future of monetary systems. The choices made today will shape how digital finance evolves in the years ahead. Learn more in ORF Global Quarterly: Energy and Tech: Powering the Future.