Digital Money 2026 Recap

Letdowns, bubbles and no-shows: The future of digital money is harder to predict than ever

On 10 June 2026, the Digital Money 2026 event in London brought together senior figures from banking, central banking, payments and technology to examine whether stablecoins are entering a bubble phase or reshaping cross-border finance, whether central bank digital currencies have lost momentum or remain strategically necessary, and whether tokenised deposits could ultimately provide a lower-risk foundation for digital money, with discussions spanning regulation, monetary sovereignty, settlement infrastructure, interoperability, and the evolving role of banks and central banks in a multi-rail financial system.

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The Event in Numbers

5

Sessions

29

Speakers

100+

Registered
Delegates

90+

Represented
Companies

Key Takeaways

Keynote

1. Stablecoins are demonstrably useful. Since 2020, the market capitalisation of Stablecoins has grown at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 106 per cent, and transaction volumes at a CAGR of 98 per cent. Circle, issuer of USDC - the second biggest and most regulated Stablecoin – recently completed an IPO. Stripe, Mastercard and Visa are building Stablecoin services. 2. The delegate poll confirmed that a majority (57 per cent) expect Stablecoins to endure and a third (36 per cent) see them as the likely future of commercial bank money (see Chart 1). Tiny minorities only reckoned that Stablecoins are a temporary solution awaiting replacement by something better, and nobody at all viewed them as an investment bubble, a tool useful primarily to criminals or as a source of systemic risk. 3. Stablecoins usage is no longer confined to the cryptocurrency markets. Non-crypto businesses are using Stablecoins to make US$1 trillion of payments a month, especially across borders. Corporate treasurers are holding Stablecoins as working capital as well as using them to make payments. Stripe, Mastercard and Visa are building the infrastructure to enable Stablecoins to go mainstream. 4. Although Visa data shows 80-90 per cent of Stablecoin activity is still driven by cryptocurrency trading, Stablecoin volumes no longer fall in lockstep with cryptocurrency volume and value. There is an expectation that as payments are automated through the adoption of agentic AI, the use of Stablecoins by non-crypto businesses will, faute de mieux, increase further. 5. Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are far from dead. In China, both retail and corporate clients are already receiving e-CNY, the digital yuan or CBDC issued by the People's Bank of China (PBOC), into digital wallets, and will hold more once it becomes interest-bearing. In Europe, the European Central Bank (ECB) still intends to issue a digital euro in 2029, provided the necessary laws and regulations are adopted in 2026. 6. The earliest CBDCs to be issued have not enjoyed conspicuous success. The Eastern Caribbean has shut the initial version of its pioneering CBDC, launched in 2021; the other live CBDCs in the Bahamas (launched 2020), Jamaica (2022) and Nigeria (2021) have experienced minimal take-up. Like e-CNY and the proposed digital euro, they were all retail CBDCs but launched into environments different from China and Europe. 7. The digital euro reflects the unique circumstances of the 21 member-states of the European Union (EU) that use the euro. Although the 21 countries are in a monetary union, the only means of payment common throughout is euro notes and coins. With cash usage declining, the reliance of Europeans on non-European card networks to make non-domestic payments infringes sovereignty. A digital version of cash is the solution. 8. Stablecoins also raise an issue of sovereignty for Europe. Though euro Stablecoins are proliferating (EURCV, EURC, EURAU, EUROe, Qivalis), 99 per cent of the value of the global Stablecoin market is denominated in US dollars. In May 2026, the President of the ECB gave a speech interpreted as sceptical about euro Stablecoins by comparison with a digital euro, especially in providing central bank money to settle wholesale transactions. 9. The likeliest outcome in Europe is a combination of tokenised monies which fulfil different use-cases. Wholesale transactions will settle between banks in CBDC. Non-banks will use Stablecoins to make cross-border payments. Tokenised deposits will be the principal form of tokenised commercial bank money. But European regulators are clear they prefer European banks to issue euro Stablecoins and tokenised deposits. 10. Whether regulators can influence outcomes as directly as that implies is questionable. Even the GENIUS Act, universally applauded in the cryptocurrency industry for promoting Stablecoins, has had little impact on the value or volume of US dollar Stablecoins since it passed. Stablecoins grew fastest before the Act was passed, because they met a need in the cryptocurrency markets. Use cases will continue to determine outcomes. 11. Use cases presently argue for the supremacy of the US dollar. According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) triennial survey of foreign exchange, the US dollar is on one side of 89 per cent of all FX trades. The euro is involved in 29 per cent of trades. So the real choice, at least in cross-border payments, is not between the US dollar and the euro but between US dollars in CBDC, Stablecoin or tokenised deposit format. 12.Use cases could over time argue for other currencies to be made available in tokenised form. Stablecoins are predominantly denominated in US dollars today because the cryptocurrency traders that need cash on-chain want to hold US dollars only. If tokenised assets are denominated in euro or sterling or other currencies, the demand to hold Stablecoins in euro, Sterling and other currencies will increase. 13.For now, however, a major reason non-US dollar Stablecoins struggle to grow is that US dollars are acceptable with a wider range of counterparties in a wider range of jurisdictions than, say, euros or sterling. US dollars also provide a more stable store of value. Stablecoins have grown because they make these benefits available to retail and wholesale customers in jurisdictions where direct access to US dollars is restricted. 14. CBDCs can be seen as innovation “theatre” that has lasted since Facebook unveiled Libra in 2019. On this view, domestic retail CBDCs are unnecessary since fast, cheap, 24/7 payment in a single currency is solved already. The shrinkage of correspondent banks indicates cross-border payments are close to a similar solution. So the case for retail CBDC reduces to the sovereignty and independence of national payments systems. 15.At least, this is the European view. The current administration in the United States, by halting work on a US dollar CBDC, has privatised digital money. It expects the private sector to innovate faster than the public, with opportunities arising in agentic payments and fractional reserve Stablecoins whose value is driven by yield. The administration also sees Stablecoin reserves as an additional means of funding the budget deficit. 16. The bet the US administration is placing on the private sector to innovate faster than the central bank can operate a CBDC looks as if it might pay off. In June 2026, The Clearing House, the private automated payments clearing house owned by 25 major US banks, announced that it will make tokenised deposit payments interoperable with traditional fiat currency payments rails such as RTP and CHIPs. 17. Europeans, on the other hand, reckon wholesale CBDCs still have value. Though requiring central banks to trust decentralised technology is a high hurdle – and Project Appia, though not Pontes, is not committed to blockchain technology - CBDCs meet demand from tokenised capital and cash markets for a risk-free settlement asset. Stablecoins, which have issuer as well as reserve risk, cannot fulfil that role. 18.If the appeal of the digital euro to the banks of Europe lies in its status as a risk-free settlement asset, for the central banks of Europe a digital euro keeps their control of monetary policy intact. Central banks also welcome commercial banks issuing tokenised deposits, because it retains in a legally if not technologically familiar format the two-tier monetary system of central and commercial bank money in a way Stablecoins cannot. 19.Tokenised deposits suit corporate use cases better than Stablecoins too. The banks that have issued tokenised deposits to facilitate intra-bank payments between corporate clients could have chosen Stablecoins for the same purpose. But the financial crime compliance costs of using Stablecoins makes the idea uneconomic. Using the deposits of the bank instead, where compliance is baked in already, circumvents that cost. 20.Corporates can issue their own tokenised money. Many are already issuing money-like instruments in the form of loyalty programmes. In such cases, money is combined with marketing. Tokenised equity and debt can be used in the same way to turn loyal customers into shareholders. Corporates will be tempted to bypass domestic and cross-border banking systems altogether in order to get paid promptly at lower cost. 21.One reason Ripple acquired treasury management systems vendor GTreasury in October 2025 was to exploit the opportunity it identified in speeding up and lowering the costs of corporate payments by making it easier for companies to pay using Stablecoins and tokenised deposits. The tie-up also aims to make it easier for companies to reinvest idle cash in the tokenised repo market. 22.One reason tokenised money market funds are being issued at scale is that corporates do not want to hold idle cash in Stablecoins where the issuer retains all the yield from the high-quality liquid assets (HQLAs) held in reserves. It is a further sign that corporates are willing to bypass banks that profit from slowing payments down, and exacting transaction fees, especially across borders through long chains of correspondent banks. 23.What keeps the banks in the payment loop for now is the question of trust. Both Stablecoins and tokenised money market funds are issued by non-banks. They have a proven tendency to dip below par in stressed markets. Infrastructural solutions, such as that being pursued by Project Agora, could solve that problem of trust by embedding tokenised monies within the existing system of centra and commercial banks. 24.The privatisation of the digital dollar creates a larger opportunity for the euro to increase its share of international reserves and cross-border payments. Though its lack of a single fiscal policy inhibits its ability to supplant the US dollar, moves such as the links between India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and the ECB’s TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS) show how the euro can increase cross-border payments traffic. 25.Concerns that a digital euro will eliminate the anonymity of private payments, cap the size of holdings and enable restrictions on the use of money are exaggerated, in Europe if not China. Although holdings of the digital euro will be capped at €3-4,000, the enabling European legislation specifies that the authorities (as opposed to banks) will see only anonymised transactional data and that the digital euro cannot be programmed. 26.The risk of government surveillance of transactions is not restricted to CBDCs anyway. The authorities can suborn banks to gain access to private data. Programmability is also a familiar issue, in the sense that governments have long had an interest in tracing payments to combat crime. So surveillance and especially programmability - since it reduces fungibility - are best considered separately from forms of money.

CBDCs are dead; long live Stablecoins?

1. Nearly half the jurisdictions currently investigating a central bank digital currency (CBDC) already have a SStablecoin regulatory regime in place, according to data cited during the discussion. This suggests regulators increasingly treat Stablecoin oversight as a precondition for, rather than a rival to, sovereign digital currency work, reversing the assumption that CBDCs would arrive first and Stablecoins would be regulated in response. 2. Polling found 38 respondents expect Stablecoins to achieve scale in cross-border payments, more than double the 16 who expect regulatory jurisdictions to compete for Stablecoin issuance business, and far ahead of the five who expect scale in domestic payments (see Chart 1). The gap between cross-border and domestic expectations was one of the sharpest splits recorded on the day. 3. The Stablecoin market, estimated at roughly US$300 billion, remains dominated by a single issuer operating out of El Salvador, whose reserves and governance sit largely outside the frameworks now being built in the EU, UK, US, Japan, Singapore and UAE. This concentration was treated as structural rather than temporary, since the dominant issuer's use case – namely, institutional crypto trading outside the United States - differs from the regulated use cases new rules are designed to serve. 4. Corporate treasury use was repeatedly framed as the real adoption test, not retail payments. Treasurers were described as wanting to use Stablecoins for money in motion rather than money at rest, using Stablecoins as a convenient tool to move between venues before shifting balances into yield-bearing tokenised deposits or money market funds. This limits how much Stablecoin float will ever sit on a corporate balance sheet and for how long. 5. An example was raised of a major bank's tokenised money market fund settling in a rival's US dollar Stablecoin rather than the bank's own deposit token, despite a separate informal poll showing users trusted the bank's brand over the Stablecoin issuer. Speakers read this as evidence that Stablecoins, tokenised deposits and CBDCs serve different functions rather than compete for the same job. 6. CBDCs were described as best suited to settlement between banks and central banks, tokenised deposits as best suited to payments within a bank or a closed network of partner banks, and Stablecoins as an open network instrument built to move value across institutions with no direct banking relationship. Conflating the three, several speakers argued, misreads why each instrument exists. 7. Speakers disagreed on whether bank deposits are at risk from Stablecoin growth. One view held any shift would be competitive rather than systemic, rewarding banks that build tokenised products quickly. Another argued that modelling used to justify strict proposed UK holding limits assumed an extreme, unevidenced scenario of near-total wholesale deposit flight, comparable in severity to a financial crisis that has never occurred. 8 A widely cited Stablecoin failure was reframed during the discussion. One issuer's reserves were held at a bank that later failed, but speakers argued the uninsured depositors of that bank were bailed out, not the Stablecoin itself, and that the bank's collapse stemmed from its own interest-rate risk management rather than from any Stablecoin-related run. 9. Regulators in major jurisdictions were described as building broadly similar frameworks, converging on how reserve assets are held and disclosed, but diverging sharply on where issuers and their backing assets must reside legally. The EU was cited as requiring a local issuer regardless of denomination, Hong Kong only for Hong Kong dollar y-denominated coins, and the UK as requiring both a UK-incorporated issuer and UK-held backing assets. These restrictions create friction for any issuer trying to operate a single global Stablecoin across borders. 10. Proposed UK holding limits for individuals, which were originally caped by the Bank of England at £20,000 per person, drew direct criticism from issuers and lawyers present. They argued that a fully reserved, regulated Stablecoin is economically close to a bank deposit and that the limits therefore reflected an overly cautious reading of deposit-flight risk rather than a proportionate response to demonstrated harm. The Bank of England has since dropped the cap. 11. Supervision, not just the text of regulation, was raised as the harder regulatory variable to predict. Multiple jurisdictions build in a step-up regime once a Stablecoin crosses a systemic threshold, shifting issuers into bank-like capital and oversight requirements, but how supervisors will actually calibrate and enforce that threshold in practice remains largely untested. 12. Whether central banks should grant Stablecoin issuers direct access to central bank money split opinion sharply. One position held this would blur the line between private and public money, effectively creating a privately issued, synthetic form of central bank currency. A competing position argued that bank-issued Stablecoins should logically include access to central bank money, since a bank issuer already sits inside the central bank's reserve and liquidity support system. 13. Financial crime data was invoked by proponents and opponents of Stablecoins. One speaker cited analysis showing Stablecoins are now used in illicit finance more than cryptocurrencies, including in sanctions-evasion networks that rely on specific Stablecoins issued outside traditional Western regulatory oversight. Another countered that cash still accounts for the overwhelming majority of financial crime and that applying legacy anti-money-laundering assumptions to digital money misreads the nature of the risk. 14. Costly infrastructure requirements, including reserve management, treasury reporting and blockchain and legacy systems integration work, were cited as reasons why banks have been slower to issue their own Stablecoins. Banks were expected to be eager issuers once regulatory clarity was in place, especially since central banks demonstrably preferred banks as issuer of Stablecoins. Launching a Stablecoin is also a genuine, income-producing investment, not a compliance exercise whose costs have to be kept down. 15. Genuine scale, in the view of several speakers, will come less from financial market infrastructure and more from large consumer-facing corporates embedding Stablecoins into everyday commerce and payments. However, consumer brands will adopt the technology only when they are confident it will not damage customer trust. This is a bar that highly regulated financial institutions do not necessarily set for their wholesale counterparties, who are assumed to be sophisticated enough to manage the risks themselves. 16. Divergence in regulatory approaches to Stablecoins between jurisdictions was described as durable rather than transitional, because financial regulators are bound by geography, history and legal and regulatory inheritances. The underlying blockchain technology can and does operate as a single operating plaform without traditional borders, so there remains a structural mismatch between national jurisdictions and a post-national technology that international coordination bodies have not yet resolved. 17. A recurring caution was that regulatory clarity alone will not catalyse adoption of Stablecoins. Even a year after the GENIUS Act - the US federal Stablecoin framework passed into law in July 2025 - detailed implementation rules were still being consulted on, and no issuer had received a permanent licence under the Act. This underlines what is likely to be a persistent gap between legislation taking effect and markets actually restructuring around it.

How will regulation change Stablecoins?

1. A pre-panel poll of 74 registrants found the main obstacle to tokenised deposits scaling is that they only work within a single bank, not bank reluctance to issue them. A quarter blamed legacy systems, and only a minority saw Stablecoins as an adequate substitute (see Chart 3). 2. Building a tokenised deposit is effectively a core banking system transformation. Each bank must independently build compliance, cybersecurity and monitoring capabilities, and forming consortiums does not remove that burden. Cross-jurisdiction coordination may even make the task harder. 3. Banks are engaged, not indifferent. A BIS survey across 93 jurisdictions found 30% had banks exploring tokenised deposits, but fewer than 20% had issued one, a gap driven by build cost rather than reluctance. 4. J.P. Morgan's JPMD remains the flagship, having processed over US$3 trillion in transactions. It has expanded from a private network to the public Base blockchain and the Canton Network, helping clients trade digital assets without relying solely on Stablecoins. 5. Tokenised deposits offer something Stablecoins cannot: structural proximity to central bank money. A tokenised deposit remains a regulated bank deposit under existing rules, while Stablecoin reserve quality varies widely, a distinction that matters most to large corporate holders. 6. Some tokenised deposits already exceed Stablecoin safety standards. One bank backs its deposit token at 150% of issued value, funded partly by shareholder capital and bail-in bonds, a buffer most Stablecoin structures lack. 7. Interoperability between banks is the key unsolved challenge. JPMD is piloting bilateral links with a Singapore bank, while the multi-bank Great British Tokenised Deposit initiative, backed by seven major UK banks, aims to enable transfers of value between banks, not just within one. 8. Because tokenised deposits sit on the issuing bank's balance sheet, transferring them requires one bank to "burn" and another to "mint" tokens. Persistent barriers around data standards, financial crime checks and legal liability keep adoption largely siloed or bilateral, limiting network effects. 9. Financial crime compliance is the hardest interoperability barrier. Banks have historically distrusted third-party identity verification, and while bank-issued verifiable credentials are a proposed fix, the poor track record of cross-bank verification standards works against it. 10. True interoperability needs a coordination layer for settlement, not full data standardisation. One bank is piloting a scheme that locks and releases value once both parties confirm a transaction, a capability that could extend tokenised deposits to retail as well as wholesale use. 11. Cross-border progress is more advanced. Project Agorá, a BIS Innovation Hub initiative, has five central banks and 22 banks across eight jurisdictions testing a shared multi-currency settlement platform, now in pilot stage but without a decision yet to move to production. 12. Some argue fragmentation across banks and standards actually limits risk by keeping value in closed loops. But fragmentation carries real costs, and JPMD's designers mitigated this by building on existing token standards such as ERC-20 and ERC-4337 rather than inventing new ones. 13. Persistent fragmentation in cross-border payments risks recreating the costs of legacy messaging networks without retiring them. Correspondent banks may see fewer intermediary steps as direct bank-to-bank tokenised networks mature, though they will likely retain their role in accessing national central bank money. 14. Programmability, not speed, is where tokenised deposits offer real advantage. Embedding conditions such as delivery-based or milestone-based payments applies to retail and corporate users alike, and success will be judged by conditional settlement capability that existing payment rails cannot match. 15. Stablecoins remain the real competitor, but their growth has been muted despite the GENIUS Act. Established payment firms building Stablecoin infrastructure suggest a maturing market rather than one overtaking tokenised deposits, which are seen as better positioned to win on scale over time.

Whatever happened to tokenised deposits?

1. Two in five delegates at Digital Money 2026 see Stablecoins as a threat to card issuers and money transfer agents, with banks almost as exposed (see Chart 4). Only one in twenty think the impact stays confined to crypto, suggesting a widespread belief that Stablecoins are breaking into payments. 2. The data tells a different story. Visa figures show 80-85% of Stablecoin activity still comes from crypto trading and DeFi, not payments. Cross-border transfers are roughly 5% of volume, on-chain settlement of tokenised assets about 3%, and daily global money transfers under 1%. 3. Stablecoins held steady near US$300 billion in market value even as bitcoin fell 50% peak to trough in 2025-26. That looks like decoupling from crypto, but more likely reflects traders parking cash on-chain because banks won't touch crypto-linked business. Either way, issuance itself isn't growing. 4. Despite lower costs, round-the-clock availability and no bank account requirement, Stablecoins still haven't out-competed domestic instant payment schemes or emerging account-to-account services, even though those incumbents carry compliance burdens and legacy system drag of their own. 5. Real adoption barriers remain: on/off-ramp costs erode the cost advantage, and accepting infrastructure is still being built. Wallet numbers, not issuer counts, are the true scale metric. Visa's 4 billion cardholders versus 14,500 issuers shows where the real bottleneck sits. 6. Merchants, not consumers, are the likely first movers on mass adoption. Yet despite resenting 2-3% card fees, few merchants have embraced Stablecoins, because card networks still offer fraud protection and chargebacks Stablecoins can't match. Sharing cost savings with merchants, not shoppers, is the more promising lever. 7. Regulatory uncertainty is fading fast. Two-thirds of 93 jurisdictions surveyed by the BIS now have Stablecoin rules in place or in progress, with regimes already live in the EU, Hong Kong, Singapore and the UAE, the US GENIUS Act passed, and the UK's rules due from October 2027. 8. Tighter rules requiring full backing by fiat deposits or high-quality liquid assets are pushing weaker Stablecoin models out of the market, letting bank-issued Stablecoins compete on trust rather than price, and easing bank fears of deposit flight. 9. Gaps remain even with regulation. The US still needs the CLARITY Act to fit Stablecoins into a digital asset taxonomy for securities settlement, while EU issuers must navigate the overlap between MiCAR and payment services licensing before they can move Stablecoins for third parties. 10. Interoperability is still broken. Leading Stablecoins now span multiple chains, USDT on ten, USDC on over thirty, but moving value between chains still relies on fragile bridges, and the data standards needed for smoother transfers remain underdeveloped. 11. Structurally, Stablecoins fall short of bank deposits: their par-redemption promise isn't always backed by assets that trade at par, and they don't settle in central bank money. That means one Stablecoin can behave differently from another, undermining the singleness money is supposed to guarantee. 12. Compliance risk is a further drag. Wallets can be frozen and transactions traced, but identifying the actual owner behind a wallet remains hard, and a bad actor can simply abandon one wallet and open another. 13. The evidence cuts both ways. Volumes, regulation and bank engagement all point to a maturing market, yet stagnant issuance, crypto-heavy usage and regulatory gaps suggest otherwise. Tokenised deposits remain banks' likely preferred alternative, and only time will settle which reading is right.

Can Stablecoins escape the cryptocurrency niche?

1. Two out of three registrants for Digital Money 2026 named interoperability between blockchain and traditional finance, and adoption by established distribution networks like card issuers, as the two biggest keys to scaling digital money (see Chart 5). 2. Card issuers and money transfer agents are already embracing Stablecoins, but interoperability remains aspirational. Asset managers tokenise money market funds mainly to reach crypto-native investors already holding assets on-chain, not to bridge them with traditional investors. 3. Stablecoins grew from US$25 billion in 2021 to over US$300 billion in 2026 largely because they were the only on-chain fiat payment option, not because issuers shared reserve yield. Tokenised money market funds now let crypto-native holders earn yield instead of just holding cash on-chain. 4. Tokenising a fund for on-chain convenience isn't genuine interoperability. DeFi and TradFi investors, instruments and networks remain separate. Real interoperability needs infrastructure that makes tokenised and traditional assets interchangeable, and it's unclear whether the private sector alone can build it. 5. Openness isn't yet a priority for incumbents. Tokenised funds are mostly digital twins of existing funds, and bank tokenisation platforms remain proprietary. Broader multi-bank projects are emerging slowly, held back by banks' reluctance to disrupt legacy systems or empower new entrants. 6. Banks have reason to hesitate. Basel Committee capital rules on cryptoasset exposures, introduced in December 2022, discourage banks from experimenting with digital money, and combined with financial crime compliance costs, give banks little incentive to invest. 7. New entrants, unburdened by legacy systems, hold a real advantage. Banks are countering with Stablecoin consortiums built fresh in the Cloud rather than retrofitted onto old infrastructure, hoping shared costs and a ready-made distribution network offset the investment required. 8. Digital money projects compete internally for scarce budget against other bank priorities, and returns are hard to prove in a nascent market. Cost estimates vary wildly too: the ECB pegged its own digital currency infrastructure at roughly €6 billion, while an independent estimate came in three times higher, at €18 billion. 9. Past central bank infrastructure projects offer a cautionary tale. The ECB's TARGET2-Securities settlement platform has never recouped its costs or delivered promised efficiencies, reinforcing bank wariness of public initiatives that push investment costs onto them. 10. Banks are wary of ceding control to a central bank, even though they already rely on central bank RTGS systems for settlement, and even warier of a private monopoly benefiting a rival. Not-for-profit, collectively governed models such as Pay.UK, which runs Faster Payments under 38 guarantor banks and Bank of England oversight, look like the more workable path. 11. The Bank of England isn't forcing the issue. Its National Payments Vision favours a collaborative public-private ecosystem over any single infrastructure monopoly, built through an industry-owned company and a Retail Payments Infrastructure Board that won't even meet for the first time until October 2026. 12. Whatever emerges, Pay.UK will keep running inter-bank payments while central banks handle settlement in central bank money. The vision covers Stablecoins, tokenised deposits, any future sterling CBDC and ordinary fiat side by side, interoperable by design on shared infrastructure. 13. Whether that infrastructure can support programmable money is the real test. Programmability would let AI move money without human intervention and open payments to more providers, though agentic AI payments still raise real concerns over accuracy and privacy. 14. Programmability's bigger promise is a self-reinforcing loop: more applications built onto a monetary token attract more users, and more users draw in more developers building further functionality, driving scale from within. 15. Regulatory clarity could trigger a similar feedback loop, making it easier to design compliant programmable money across jurisdictions, which is why the Bank of England insists any new payments infrastructure must sit on predictable regulation. 16. But getting regulation right domestically is far easier than aligning it across borders. Regulatory divergence is already the biggest obstacle to scaling cross-border payments, precisely where faster, cheaper, more transparent payments are needed most. 17. Even Stablecoins, built for cross-border use, can't escape this patchwork. A Stablecoin licensed in one jurisdiction can't legally move into another without an equivalent framework, making the regulatory landscape too unpredictable for durable cross-border business models. 18. Ultimately, neither interoperability nor distribution networks can substitute for consumer confidence. People need to trust the technology, the issuers and the regulatory protection behind digital money. Interoperability and distribution will build on that trust, not create it.

What are the futures of digital money?