cbdc

This week three central banks — the Bank of England, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Bank of Thailand — ran Project Meridian FX: an experiment linking their national settlement systems with distributed ledger tech to settle cross-border currency trades atomically, both sides clearing together or not at all. The crypto timeline erupted: “TradFi is going onchain. Game over. Bullish.”
Read what they actually built.
The mechanism. Meridian uses a “synchronisation operator” — a permissioned coordinator that connects existing central-bank systems through a shared ledger. The ledger is real. The efficiency is real. But there is no public blockchain here. No cryptocurrency. No token anyone can buy, hold, or stake. It’s the plumbing of blockchain, installed inside the plumbing of central banking.
The hidden dependency. The cheering assumes “uses a ledger” means “adopted crypto.” But crypto was never just the ledger — a shared database that records transactions is forty years old. What made crypto different was the ledger without a gatekeeper: settlement no single party could approve, reverse, or deny. Central banks kept the gatekeeper. They adopted the technology and quietly rejected the idea underneath it.
The human consequence. Look at who the benefits go to. Faster settlement, less counterparty risk, lower cost — those accrue to the institutions running the system. The decentralization, the self-custody, the permissionlessness — the parts that were supposed to be for you — are exactly what got left out. You can’t own Meridian. You can’t hold it. It makes banks faster. It doesn’t make users freer.
The strategic fork. One read: this normalizes tokenization, and a rising institutional tide eventually lifts every onchain asset. The harder read: it proves institutions can capture every efficiency of blockchain while discarding decentralization entirely — making permissionless crypto not the future of finance, but a niche beside it. Both can look true for a while. Only one survives contact with scale.
The unanswered question. If a settlement rail can be fast, programmable, and onchain without being decentralized, then decentralization no longer gets to justify itself on efficiency. It has to stand on something else — censorship-resistance, self-custody, access for the unbanked. The real question Meridian forces isn’t whether crypto won. It’s: once the institutions have taken the ledger, what is decentralization actually for?
That’s the question worth sitting with. The banks took the part that was easy to copy. What’s left is the part crypto still has to prove was worth building.
786 Crypto Wolf Research — Follow the signal, not the noise.
#Tokenization #CBDC #ProjectMeridian #786CryptoWolf

If you pay by card and your order doesn’t arrive, you usually get your money back. With the digital euro advocated by the European Council, maybe not.
In the new episode of Territorio Bitcoin, I review the three battles being wrapped up in Brussels before the end of the year that will determine what the digital euro will look like in your day-to-day life:
• Refunds: what happens when a purchase goes wrong.
• Fees: who pays for each payment.
• The per-person limit: how many digital euros you’ll be able to hold.
Full episode (22 minutes) on Territorio Bitcoin, the Territorio Blockchain podcast, on iVoox.

When people talk about the digital euro, almost everyone compares it with what they already carry in their wallet: a card. In the latest video on the Territorio Blockchain channel, I revisit that comparison with a specific question: who really protects your purchases?
They are based on two different models. Cards are issued by private entities and operate on international payment networks. The digital euro is public money in digital form—a central bank digital currency being developed by the ECB to coexist with cash and today’s electronic payments.

The digital euro now has a timeline. Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB’s Executive Board responsible for payments, said in an interview with Milano Finanza (published by the ECB on October 24) that a pilot will begin in 2027, in which ECB staff and staff from national central banks will make real payments.
The underlying issue is sovereignty. Today, cash is the only central bank money citizens can use, and we are paying more and more online. Two out of every three card payments go through non-European networks.