Central banks increasingly frame Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as upgrades to today’s payment systems, promising faster settlement, lower costs, greater efficiency, and a more trustworthy monetary infrastructure. They also increasingly describe retail CBDCs as “digital cash,” even though cash’s defining feature, true transactional privacy, cannot be replicated in a permissioned, identity-linked system. Once you look under the hood, a different reality emerges: CBDCs have the potential to introduce structural risks to privacy, expand the surveillance and control capabilities of states, and create new levers of power for central banks and global institutions. As CBDCs move from exploration to pilots and legislation in 2026, three trends illustrate where things are truly heading. read more in the link.