Kit Knightly – Off-Guardian May 8, 2025

The planned rollout of a planet-wide network of “interoperable” digital currencies has shifted gears this year.

Digital Currency is still the endgame, but – in keeping with the spirit of the age – it seems they are changing the method to create the illusion of sides and choices.

We covered this briefly our most recent This Week in the New Normal, but it’s worth a deeper dive.

For years now OffG (and many others in the alternative media sphere) have covered the plans for programmable digital currency as a means for technocratic social control. This goal is years old, but first came to real prominence in the wake of the Covid “pandemic” and the attempted re-shaping of our entire society that entailed.

From 2020 to 2023, the development of “central bank digital currencies” (CBDCs) around the world was a steady upward line, reaching its peak when 130+ of the 197 nations on the planet, representing over 98% of the world’s economic output, were in the process of developing their own CBDC.

But then things went quiet, and some nations – including Japan and Canada – announced they would no longer be moving forward with their CBDC.

Why that would be I couldn’t say, except to speculate that concerns about control and privacy became too widely publicized, and market research indicated too much public scepticism to proceed.

Evidence for this can be found in the FinTech article “Bank of Canada Puts CBDC Development on Ice: Is This Indicative of Global CBDC Demise?”, from September 2024:

“The truth is that people don’t really want CBDCs,” says Stuart Connolly, CIO at investment and operating company Deus X Capital. He explains that concerns about freedom and privacy are still rife when it comes to CBDCs. “They have been roundly rejected by the business and crypto communities, and privacy advocates have campaigned against them because they are best suited to authoritarian economies where transparency can infringe upon freedoms and the creation of money and wealth are heavily controlled. Ultimately, there are few benefits to CBDCs and they simply aren’t compelling.”

That’s just an opinion of one man, of course, but it does jive with my instinctive feeling – CBDCs got too much bad press, and a shift in tactics was needed.

This brings us to 2025. There has been more movement on the CBDC front this year.

On April 9th the EU published the final draft of its “Digital Euro Bill”, and then just a few days ago, the European Central Bank announced a deal with 70 corporate trading partners to test “usage cases” for digital Euro transactions.

In the UK, the Bank of England is testing out offline payment systems for the Digital Pound.

Canada just *ahem* “elected” Mark Carney as their new Prime Minister, and while the Bank of Canada allegedly “scaled down” work on its CBDC last year, Carney has expressed very clear pro-CBDC thoughts in the past. It wouldn’t be shocking to see it restarted in a new “elbows up, look at us standing up to Donald Trump” context.

Indeed, that’s now the heart of the CBDC story.

The role of Donald Trump and the USA

Unusually, in modern propaganda narratives, the United States always seemed an almost reluctant participant in the CBDC scheme. While the digital Yuan, Euro and Pound were making strides, the digital dollar was stagnating in the planning stages, with reports claiming it was not feasible, safe or necessary.

Then, when Trump was elected to his second term, he vetoed the digital dollar completely via executive order. Banning all development of a central bank-backed digital dollar.

That’s not to say the Trump Administration is anti-digital money entirely. Rather, they plan to rely on dollar-backed private stablecoins. In basic terms, they still want a digital currency, they’re just not so crazy about the “central bank” part.

This makes it more of a semantic difference than anything else. It’s all about marketing, messaging and branding. The now cliché routine of promoting [thing] by having Donald Trump come out against it.

If Trump is anti-CBDCs then a near-decade of Pavlovian conditioning means almost every “liberal” in the Western world will suddenly be violently pro-CBDCs to the point of madness. CBDCs will become some weird badge of freedom to these people.

Further, since the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency has always been one of the key support beams in American hegemony, any threat to that status instantly becomes “anti-Imperialism”, casting the digital Yuan and/or Euro as the preferred currency of the anti-Imperialists.

There’s more, potentially, too. I have discussed what I believe to be the planned controlled demolition of the US Empire before, and could easily see Trump’s “short-sighted CBDC reluctance” playing a part in that, as the managed decline of the US is part-blamed on the surge of digital Yuan and Euros dominating the market.

That’s certainly what you can take away from articles like this one in Forbes, which headlines:

America’s Self-Inflicted CBDC Vacuum

And bemoans the fact that:

By pulling the Federal Reserve out of Project Cedar, retreating from the BIS-led Project mBridge, and gagging Treasury officials who had been mapping a cross-border dollar pilot, Washington has ceded the initiative to Europe, where policymakers are racing to finalise a “digital euro,” and to Beijing, which is already moving oil money through e-CNY corridors.

There’s also this piece in The Conversation, which suggests…

The New Cold War race for digital currencies could redefine global power.

And goes on to highlight:

Nations vulnerable to US sanctions, including China, are particularly attracted to these CBDC-based settlement networks – as the US continues to weaponise its dollar. Just one way is through sanctions that exclude certain countries from the SWIFT system: they’ve been described as “the nuclear option” of financial sanctions […] CBDC networks allow nations to bypass traditional financial infrastructure and reduce reliance on the US dollar in cross-border trade.

The intended propaganda narrative is becoming quite clear. CBDCs are being linked to freedom from the US dollar and – more specifically – Donald Trump.

Indeed, this April article from Reuters essentially credits Donald Trump’s ban with rejuvenating the global CBDC movement:

Central bank digital currencies have often been deemed a solution in search of a problem. But U.S. President Donald Trump appears to have provided a rationale for CBDCs, even as he has banned the development of a digital dollar.

Conclusion

So, what is the current state of CBDCs?

A brief analysis would suggest that it serves almost as a microcosm of the Great Reset in general, in which grand plans for worldwide changes stalled at the halfway mark because the people pushing the scheme underestimated the speed of public understanding and power of public reluctance.

Now, we are witnessing the early stages of a re-launch as a faux partisan issue.

In this instance, the specific context is Donald Trump’s “trade war”, which will see CBDCs rebranded as a sensible non-Trumpian option and a way of rejecting US dollar dominance (or maybe even circumventing tariffs, look out for that in the future).

Who knows, maybe we’ll even look back at the “damage” caused by “Trump’s trade war”, and be told that digital currencies would prevent a future where the world’s economy is “held hostage by one narcissist” or something along those lines.

That will cleanly sweep the “left” into the pro-CBDC camp.

Meanwhile, to mop up the stragglers on the populist “right”, Donald Trump’s America (and maybe a few others for appearances’ sake) will have their alternative non-central bank digital currencies instead.

Creating what this FinTech article calls a “bifurcated” financial system. Or the appearance of one at least.

There are already academic papers talking up the benefits of stablecoins and CBDCs “co-existing”, and it’s not hard to see that translating into a financial two-party system – the illusion of choice and difference. Two bodies sharing a head.

But the branding will allow each “side” to point out the superficial differences between the systems and contrast their good social control with the other “side’s” bad social control, and engender tribalism along predictable old-fashioned lines.

They’ll be “interoperable” too, of course, because that’s the whole point. But people will be too invested in the argument to notice or understand what that really means.

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