Former CFTC chair Timothy Massad laid it out at London's Digital Money Summit on May 19: a US digital dollar is ultimately inevitable, and the current CBDC ban is nothing but political window dressing. “We don’t have a central bank president who is going to get out there and speak about wholesale or retail CBDC, but that does not mean that we are not looking at how to create one,” he said.
The CBDC Ban as a Political Facade
Mark Gould, the Federal Reserve's chief payments executive, confirmed that a digital dollar is not currently within the Fed's remit but would fall under its responsibility if introduced. Massad noted that House Republicans on the same day pushed to make the CBDC ban permanent inside a major housing bill, building on Trump's early 2025 executive order barring federal agencies from developing a CBDC. Yet these moves, he argued, do not reflect what happens behind closed doors.
Project Agora Reveals Quiet US Participation
Massad pointed to Project Agora, a BIS initiative involving the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and six other central banks testing tokenized deposits alongside wholesale central bank money on a programmable platform. The US may stay silent publicly, but its technical teams are already building rails with international peers.
What the US Risks by Staying Out
Massad warned that global tokenization trends are forcing the US to build equivalent digital settlement infrastructure. Stepping away from international experiments could cost the US influence over global digital payment standards. He served as CFTC chair from 2014 to 2017 and has long pushed for faster US action — the question of whether private stablecoins can preserve dollar dominance remains unsettled.