20 Potential Use Cases for a Central Bank Digital Currency

In the changing landscape of global finance, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) stand out as an innovation that may redefine monetary transactions for the digital age.

As countries around the world grapple with the intricacies of designing, deploying, and managing these digital assets, the discourse surrounding CBDCs has centered on their potential benefits and the challenges that accompany their implementation.

This blog aims to dive into the use cases of CBDCs, shedding light on how they promise to enhance financial inclusion, streamline payment systems, and bolster economic modernization. While the path to realizing the full potential of CBDCs includes developmental hurdles—from ensuring robust security to navigating regulatory complexities—the allure of the possibilities for both economies and individuals is compelling and worthy of further exploration.

Top 20 Use Cases for CBDCs

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) hold promise for a wide range of applications across various sectors.

Here are 20 potential use cases:‍

Domestic Payments‍

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) offer a digital alternative to physical cash, enabling individuals and businesses to make everyday transactions within a country electronically, enhancing convenience and efficiency while reducing reliance on traditional banking infrastructure.

Cross-Border Payments‍

CBDCs streamline cross-border transactions by facilitating faster, cheaper, and more transparent transfers compared to traditional methods, bypassing intermediaries and reducing settlement times, which benefits businesses, individuals, and economies alike.

Remittances‍

CBDCs provide expatriates with a cost-effective and efficient means to send money to their families back home, reducing fees and processing times associated with traditional remittance channels, thereby improving the livelihoods of recipients and fostering financial inclusion.

Financial Inclusion‍

CBDCs bridge the gap between the unbanked or underbanked populations and formal financial services by offering a secure and accessible digital payment solution, empowering individuals to participate in the formal economy and improve their financial well-being.

Government Benefits and Subsidies‍

CBDCs enable governments to distribute social welfare benefits and subsidies directly to citizens' digital wallets, enhancing transparency, reducing administrative costs, and minimizing leakage and fraud in social welfare programs.

E-commerce‍

CBDCs facilitate seamless online payments for goods and services, providing merchants and consumers with a secure, low-cost, and efficient payment method, thereby stimulating e-commerce growth and fostering digital economic activity.

Micropayments‍

CBDCs support cost-effective transactions for small-value purchases, such as digital content, online services, or microtransactions in gaming, enabling new business models and revenue streams while enhancing user experience and convenience.

Tokenization of Assets‍

CBDCs enable the tokenization of various assets, including real estate, stocks, and commodities, by representing them as digital tokens on a blockchain, thereby increasing liquidity, accessibility, and efficiency in asset markets.

Smart Contracts and Programmable Money‍

CBDCs facilitate the execution of smart contracts, enabling automated and trustless contractual agreements with predefined conditions, such as automated payments upon the fulfillment of contractual obligations, enhancing efficiency and reducing counterparty risk.

Supply Chain Finance‍

CBDCs streamline trade finance processes by digitizing trade documents, automating payment settlements, and providing transparent and immutable transaction records along the supply chain, thereby reducing costs, delays, and fraud in global trade.

Identity Verification‍

CBDCs serve as a foundation for secure digital identity systems, enabling individuals to prove their identity electronically while enhancing privacy, security, and efficiency in identity verification processes, thereby reducing fraud and improving access to financial services.

International Trade Settlement‍

CBDCs simplify and accelerate the settlement of international trade transactions by serving as a common settlement currency, reducing reliance on multiple currencies, intermediaries, and settlement delays, thereby lowering transaction costs and enhancing trade efficiency.

Monetary Policy Transmission‍

CBDCs provide central banks with real-time visibility into money flows and economic activity, enabling more effective implementation and transmission of monetary policy tools, such as interest rate adjustments, reserve requirements, and quantitative easing measures, to achieve macroeconomic objectives.

Peer-to-Peer Lending‍

CBDCs facilitate peer-to-peer lending platforms, allowing individuals to lend and borrow funds directly from each other without intermediaries, thereby providing access to credit for underserved populations and enabling efficient capital allocation.

Charitable Donations‍

CBDCs increase transparency and traceability in charitable donations by providing donors and recipients with immutable transaction records on a blockchain, ensuring that funds are allocated efficiently, fraud is minimized, and trust in charitable organizations is enhanced.

Crowdfunding‍

CBDCs enable crowdfunding campaigns to raise funds for projects or initiatives by issuing digital tokens representing contributors' stakes in the project, thereby democratizing access to capital, fostering innovation, and enabling community-driven projects.

Gambling and Gaming‍

CBDCs provide a secure and transparent payment method for online gambling and gaming platforms, enhancing user trust, fairness, and compliance with regulatory requirements, while reducing transaction costs and fraud associated with traditional payment methods.

Healthcare‍

CBDCs facilitate the exchange of medical records and payments between healthcare providers and patients securely and efficiently, enabling seamless access to healthcare services, improving patient outcomes, and reducing administrative burdens and costs.

Carbon Credits Trading‍

CBDCs create a transparent marketplace for buying and selling carbon credits, enabling businesses and individuals to trade carbon credits efficiently, incentivizing emissions reductions, and promoting sustainable development and environmental conservation efforts.

Public Transportation‍

CBDCs integrate with public transportation systems, allowing passengers to pay for fares seamlessly using digital wallets or mobile apps, thereby improving the efficiency, accessibility, and affordability of public transportation services while reducing reliance on cash and physical tickets.

Kaleido Helps Central and Commercial Banks Build Faster and Test More

There are also considerable technical hurdles in developing a CBDC infrastructure, including ensuring system security, scalability, and resilience against cyber-attacks, as well as addressing issues related to interoperability with existing financial systems and technologies.

At Kaleido, we’re focused on building a robust, secure, and scalable technology stack that can quickly bring digital currency projects to production and make it easier for nations and banks to rapidly test various CBDC designs.

This kind of testing requires hands-on environments so teams can iterate towards solutions around privacy and inclusion.

Kaleido's CBDC Sandbox makes it easy for central and commercial banks to build fully-custom, wholly-owned CBDC solutions for testing use cases and moving to production—cutting development times and cost by 10x.

Our platform is trusted around the globe in wholesale, retail, and experimental CBDC programs for its ability to meet the most stringent requirements.

For a closer look at CBDC projects we’ve been involved in and to glean lessons learned from our global implementations, schedule a talk with one of our solution architects today.