On 3 September 2026 the Reserve Bank of Australia addressed two significant questions for payment and digital-asset firms. It published a joint RBA and Treasury paper, Retail Central Bank Digital Currency in the Australian Context: An Update, concluding that there is no clear public interest case for a retail CBDC in Australia. On the same…
On 27 May 2026 the Bank for International Settlements and the Institute of International Finance published the findings report for Project Agora, and the headline was concrete. A prototype had settled wholesale cross-border payments across several currencies using tokenised central bank reserves and tokenised commercial bank deposits, and the project’s legal analysis found that settlement…
On 28 October 2025 the Hong Kong Monetary Authority published the e-HKD Pilot Programme Phase 2 Report and, with it, drew a line under three years of retail testing. The report sets out the HKMA’s latest policy stance on Hong Kong’s central bank digital currency: the immediate priority for the e-HKD sits in wholesale settlement…
On 14 July 2026 the Banque centrale du Luxembourg (BCL) confirmed it will take part in the European Central Bank’s digital euro pilot, joining the ECB and 18 other Eurosystem national central banks in a controlled test of a beta version of the digital euro. The same day the ECB named the 36 payment service…
Read the Norges Bank Financial Infrastructure Report 2026 as a status update and you will miss the part that lands on your desk. It reads reassuring on day one and demanding on day two: Norges Bank says the Norwegian payment system runs well, with stable operations and few disruptions, then spends most of its pages…