Digital Finance CRC (DFCRC), the research organization working with the Reserve bank of Australia on a central bank digital currency (CBDC) pilot, published a report on the state of CBDC globally. For advanced economies, it believes that wholesale CBDCs are likely to be issued before retail ones. And it raised a few areas where it sees a greater need for wholesale policy discussion.
It acknowledged that Australia has stated that a wholesale CBDC has a stronger policy rationale.
Part of the reason why wholesale CBDCs are likely to go first is they have fewer hurdles. Central bank experiments published to date have tended to focus far more on wholesale than retail, so there’s a larger body of shared knowledge. Wholesale CBDCs only involve modest technological modifications. Most importantly, they are not politically controversial, unlike retail CBDCs, for example, in the United States.
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