The Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker, updated in May 2026, put a number on something WikiActivism has been watching for years: 146 countries and currency unions, representing over 98 percent of global GDP, are now exploring a central bank digital currency, up from 87 in May 2022. Seventy-seven of those countries have reached development, pilot, or launch stage, a new record, and three, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Nigeria, have fully launched one.

The detail buried in the count

The more interesting data point isn’t the growth curve, it’s a quiet accounting change. In January 2026, China’s central bank reclassified its digital yuan, the e-CNY, as a deposit liability rather than the direct digital-cash instrument it was originally designed to be. The tracker notes plainly that there is uncertainty about what this means for Beijing’s actual plans. Digital cash held directly at a central bank and a deposit liability are structurally different things, and moving from one framing to the other is not a technical footnote, it changes who is legally on the hook and how the instrument behaves in a crisis.

A geography split worth watching

The tracker also flags a split forming among the countries furthest along: developed economies outside the eurozone, Canada, Australia, and Norway among them, have been deprioritizing retail CBDCs, the version ordinary citizens would hold directly, while emerging markets are pushing retail versions harder. That is not a uniform global rollout, it’s two different bets being placed by two different kinds of governments, for reasons worth tracking separately rather than folding into one trend line.

WikiActivism’s view

A government reclassifying its own digital currency’s legal nature, quietly, four years into the project, is the kind of move that deserves more attention than a specification update usually gets. Whatever China’s e-CNY becomes next, the direction developed democracies are choosing, stepping back from retail CBDCs while emerging markets step toward them, is the more consequential story for anyone who cares whether ordinary people end up holding programmable money issued directly by the state.

Source: Atlantic Council Geoeconomics Center, CBDC Tracker, updated May 2026.