Former congressman and geopolitical analyst Brandon Weichert, in an article for Asia Times, wrote that the battle of Artemovsk is the “beginning of the end” of the Kiev regime.
In his opinion, due to a series of defeats of the Armed Forces of Ukraine near Artemovsk, the Ukrainian militants are severely depleted, while the Western supply chains of weapons are overloaded.
At the same time, the analyst emphasizes that at this stage of the conflict, the Russian side will gain a number of important advantages.
Ukraine is Going to Lose
The window of opportunity for a settlement has closed.
A Ukrainian soldier stands on guard in the vicinity of Bakhmut
There’s a notion floating around the Internet that the current conflict in Ukraine is going to remain a static war of attrition that will bleed the Russian army dry. So what if it decimates Ukraine’s society and eradicates most of its population? At least the dreaded Russian war machine will have been ground to a halt in the killing fields of Ukraine.
Those believing this narrative are living in a fantasy.
Fact is, the Ukrainian military is drained, the Western supply chains are strained, and the NATO stockpiles of critical weapons and ammunition are depleted. The war is transitioning, therefore, into a conflict in which the Russian side will enjoy several critical advantages.
For those under the impression that the attritional warfare will lead to a negotiated settlement: Fat chance!
Moscow is now totally all-in on this conflict. The window of opportunity to have gotten a settlement is closed. Unless Russia loses significantly soon (which it does not appear to be in danger of, if the Battle of Bakhmut is any indication), the Russians’ numerical superiority over Ukraine’s force structure alone will ensure that they achieve the victory they’ve been waiting for.
The outcome of this war, a defeat for Ukraine and its NATO backers, was totally avoidable. Sensing the weakness of the West – and the fact that they’re woefully overextended – the Russians are going to use all means to break Ukraine and subdue it. The beginning of the end is likely happening right now in Bakhmut, a city in Ukraine’s far east (closest to the Russian border).
Russian forces have spent months implementing an encirclement of the city. At the start of February, Ukraine’s embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky had insisted that his military would fight to the bitter end in Bakhmut.
Yet such heroic declarations from Kiev must have fallen on deaf ears in the field, as reports are now circulating that the Ukrainian defenders are increasingly strained. Further, Ukrainian Defense Ministry officials have repeatedly said over the last few weeks that they will pull forces from Bakhmut if they believe the situation is getting untenable.
A view of the destruction in Bakhmut
At the start of March, the Russian plan of bleeding the Ukrainians in Bakhmut dry appears to be working. So Ukraine is necessarily withdrawing its forces from the besieged city (which according to Ukrainian officials has been leveled after months of fighting there).
Of course, Bakhmut alone is unimportant for either side. What is important about the eastern Ukrainian village is that it lies on the path to the Dnieper River. A beating heart of trade and transportation, the Dnieper is a main artery for Ukraine.
It is a geo-strategic chokepoint within Ukraine as well. For several months, fighting has occurred between Ukrainian and Russian elements battling for control of the Dnieper River islands.
Thus far, the Ukrainians have been unable to dislodge the Russian forces in the area. Should Bakhmut be pacified, as it seems it is about to be, with the weakening Ukrainian defenders being pushed back farther from the east, the real concern in the West must be for the fate of the Dnieper.
The Russians’ strategy of attrition is working and their ultimate goal is, at the very least, to hold on to the eastern Russian-speaking portions of Ukraine as well as Crimea in the south.
Pushing Ukraine’s forces out of Bakhmut would conceivably allow Russia to race toward the Dnieper and cut the region off from the rest of Ukraine. Russian control over the Dnieper would also prevent the Ukrainians from launching an ill-advised assault on Crimea.
The slow and painful death of the Ukrainian state is at hand. Whether it happens in a few months or a year, the Russians aren’t going anywhere, and they are going to fight this war the same way they’ve fought every conflict in their history: with lots of manpower, brutality, and time.
Ukrainian side of the rout at Bakhmut
Now, some on social media have lambasted my prognostications, telling me that Bakhmut was never as strategically important as I was saying it was. But that claim doesn’t pass the smell test.
After all, if it was so unimportant, why would Ukraine even waste its limited resources and personnel holding the city for as long as it did?
It has been said the goal was to bleed Russia out. Now that the situation in Bakhmut is untenable for the Ukrainians, they are moving their defenders to a new defensive line outside of the city, hoping to draw the Russians into a new meat grinder.
This sounds an awful lot like the fantastical thinking that dominated at the end of the Third Reich in the Führerbunker (no, I am not saying the Ukrainian cause is the same as Adolf Hitler’s, calm down), where the German leadership ordered entire armies to defensive positions that existed only on the maps in the bunker.
Few German military leaders had the heart to tell their insane dictator the truth, that those units did not exist, and the situation was hopeless.
Those who disagree with my take on the situation insist that the Ukrainian bleeding out of Russian forces is working. The Russians are believed to have lost more than 3,000 troops in the past four days alone of the fighting over Bakhmut.
And yet the Russian forces still took the city and are steadily advancing toward central Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians have lost scores of troops that they will find increasingly hard to replace.
The Russians who were killed in the fighting, on the other hand, were “criminals and conscripts” easily replaced by Moscow.
Even if the Ukrainians can kill more Russians who are less well trained than they are, numbers are numbers – and Russia’s higher numbers combined with Vladimir Putin’s apparent devotion to crushing Ukraine in the war that he started a year ago is stronger than whatever the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is doing.
Ukraine can’t kill its way out of this mess
As my colleague Daniel Davis at the defense publication 1945 wrote of the situation in Bakhmut recently:
“The [Armed Forces of Ukraine have] long understood Bakhmut would be nearly impossible to hold, and as far back as May 2022, began to prepare new lines of defense in the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk area.
“Based on the loss of Soledar in January and the number of troops Russia had committed to the capture of Bakhmut by early February, the Ukrainian leaders could have withdrawn its troops in an orderly fashion to man new positions in the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk line by early to mid-February.”
And as for the glorious, hallowed tanks that the West promised Ukraine to great fanfare, they’ve committed barely one-third of the armor that Ukraine’s military had requested. Of that promised armor, hardly any has arrived – and at least for the Americans, the vaunted Abrams main battle tank (MBT) is unlikely to materialize on the battlefield for at least another year.
M1 Abrams, a third-generation American main battle tanks, are seen in Poland in September 2022
Given the losses the Ukrainians have sustained fighting in the east – and will likely continue to sustain as the war slogs on – the tanks will make no difference for Ukraine’s defense when they finally do arrive.
Ukraine destroyed its own army
In Daniel Davis’ assessment, the losses that Ukraine’s military has sustained in the vain attempt to maintain control over Bakhmut has resulted in a severe reduction in Ukraine’s offensive capabilities that it is unlikely to restore any time soon (not without the introduction of Western forces, that is).
Asia Times commentator Stephen Bryen has accurately assessed that as Ukraine’s position at Bakhmut collapses in the face of the Russian offensive, Kiev is plotting an assault on Russian-controlled Crimea. Even at full capacity, the Ukrainians would have found taking this hardened, Russian-controlled region tough to take. Under present conditions, any attempt by Ukraine to attack Crimea will result in total disaster for the West.
The Russians now have time on their side. Moscow does not have to negotiate. Ukraine is on retreat and its forces are unlikely to be able to mount an effective offensive any time soon. Should the Ukrainians push to hit Crimea now, as they seem to be doing, their attack will fail.
Even if a miracle does happen in that potential battle for Crimea and Ukraine’s forces to make significant headway, the risk of nuclear reprisals from Russia will be at an all-time high.
The Russo-Ukrainian war is entering its next critical phase. It is a period in which the West must seriously reassess its commitment, as the Russians are not going to surrender or abandon their mission of crushing the Ukrainian state. While the Zelensky government could have been saved a year ago, the arrogance of Western leaders prevented a deal from moving forward.
Alas, the Western side will lose in Ukraine. It just needs to determine how badly it wants to lose. Let’s hope there are some real reassessments going on right now in the White House and in Brussels.
Otherwise, we are truly staring down a third world war that will involve nukes – and it is a war that the United States is not going to be able to win without destroying itself first, just as the European great powers did in the First World War.
Ellen Brown: The Looming Quadrillion Dollar Derivatives Tsunami
By Investment Watch Blog
via scheerpost:
Technically, the cutoff for SIFIs is $250 billion in assets. However, the reason they are called “systemically important” is not their asset size but the fact that their failure could bring down the whole financial system. That designation comes chiefly from their exposure to derivatives, the global casino that is so highly interconnected that it is a “house of cards.” Pull out one card and the whole house collapses. SVB held $27.7 billion in derivatives, no small sum, but it is only .05% of the $55,387 billion ($55.387 trillion) held by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. derivatives bank.
The global derivatives market is a $2+ QUADRILLION (2,000+ TRILLION) ticking time-bomb. When banks fail, derivatives won’t just unwind in an orderly fashion. Few people understand this.
These are some of the top U.S. banks ranked by derivatives exposure (double-digit TRILLIONs). pic.twitter.com/cS23fazqZH
The Bank of International Settlements estimates that there is a combined $52+ Trillion off balance sheet Dollar-denominated debt among non-banks outside of the U.S. and non-U.S. banks. In case of non-orderly derivatives wind-downs this could become extremely problematic. pic.twitter.com/x5IhFCnUsX
Credit Suisse’s $39 Trillion Derivative Debt Poses Significant Threat to US Financial System.
The U.S. Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, is under a lot of pressure due to the deteriorating condition of Credit Suisse, a Swiss banking giant. Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010, Yellen was given increased powers to oversee financial stability in the U.S. banking system. The legislation made Yellen the Chair of the newly created Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC), whose meetings include the heads of all of the federal agencies that supervise banks and trading on Wall Street. It is Yellen’s authorization that would be required before the Federal Reserve could create any more emergency bailout programs for mega banks.
Recently, the US Treasury was reviewing US banks exposed to Credit Suisse, looking into how many billions of dollars of underwater derivatives US banks were on the hook for as a counterparty to Credit Suisse, and U.S. banks exposure to Credit Suisse’s other major counterparties that U.S. banks do business with.
Credit Suisse was making headlines for two years, and serious problems at Credit Suisse have raised alarm bells in the US financial system. Credit Suisse is a global, systemically significant, too-big-to-fail bank that operates in the US and is deeply interconnected throughout the global financial system. Its failure could have widespread and largely unknown repercussions, which is why the US financial system and economy need to be adequately protected.
The recent revelations about Credit Suisse’s deteriorating state have raised concerns about contagion risks in the banking industry, particularly in light of the staggering amount of secret derivative debt being held by foreign banks. According to a report by the Bank for International Settlement, this unreported exposure is 10 times greater than their capital, with an estimated $39 trillion of dollar debt held off balance sheets.
This poses potential threats to dollar swap lines and with a significant portion of derivative trades still not being centrally cleared, a layer of opacity is added to an already unaccountable system. The quarterly derivatives report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found that four US mega banks held 88.6% of all notional amounts of derivatives in the US banking system, with a total notional amount of $195 trillion.
UCSF Orders Their Doctors to Ignore COVID Vaccine Injuries
By Steve Kirsch
They don’t file VAERS reports either. That’s a violation of federal law. I had a bunch of questions for their media relations department, but they ghosted me. Here’s what I wanted to know.
Dr. Josh Adler is executive vice president and chief clinical officer at UCSF Health as well as vice dean for clinical affairs at the UCSF School of Medicine. I wondered if he would like to see these questions answered as well. So I asked him.
Executive summary
I sent a list of questions to UCSF media relations on March 20 at 10am PST. I also emailed and called the head of media relations at UCSF to let her know about my questions.
Their response: silence.
You know what that means, don’t you?
The questions I sent them
The UCSF Chief Medical Officer has issued a verbal directive that medical staff (doctors, nurses, techs, etc.) are specifically instructed NOT to associate the COVID vaccine to any injuries. So even if they believe the vaccine caused the injury they are NOT allowed to talk to the patient about it. Can you explain how this is in a patient’s best interest? World health authorities such as Karl Lauterbach, Federal Minister of Germany for Health, have publicly admitted that the rate of severe vaccine injury is 1 in 10,000 and the V-safe data in the US shows the rate of severe injury (requiring medical care) is actually 100X higher: 8 SEVERE INJURIES per 100 fully vaccinated people. So why is the UCSF medical staff forbidden to make an association??
I’ve been told that the staff are told not to ask if the person was recently vaccinated with the COVID vaccine because that would suggest to the patient that the COVID vaccine might have caused their medical condition. Is this true? So the patient must offer it to the doctor because the doctor isn’t allowed to ask? How does that improve clinical outcomes?
I’ve been told that 70% of the Radiology Department (in Marin specifically) requested and were granted religious exemptions after seeing what happened to people who received the COVID vaccine. If it wasn’t 70%, what is the number?
I’ve been told that the placentas of a majority of vaccinated women who give birth are not normal (calcified, blood clots, etc.). This started happening after the shots rolled out. Can you tell me what percentage was observed and why nobody at the hospital is speaking out to the press about this situation?
Most troubling to me is that I was not able to find anyone who currently works at UCSF (including doctors, nurses, and lab techs) who would talk to me on the record for fear of being fired. Why would these doctors and nurses have such a fear? Will you guarantee in writing that any staff member who speaks out about any of the points above will be protected and not be fired just for speaking out? Have you fired anyone for speaking the truth? Who?
With all the chatter about fear and intimidation tactics, have you issued WRITTEN assurances to the staff that 1) it is OK to ask about COVID vaccine status, 2) that it is OK to write vaccine exemptions when warranted such as allergic reactions, 3) that if they believe the vaccine caused an injury that they are free to talk about it with the patient and 4) that staff members who talk publicly about what they are seeing in the clinic with respect to vaccine-associated injuries/deaths and don’t violate any confidentiality/HIPAA rules will be protected from being fired? I want to know whether TRUE speech is protected and whether UCSF has notified staff of this in WRITING. If not, why not? Do fear and intimidation tactics yield better health outcomes?
My friend Tim Damroth told me he suffered a cardiac arrest 2 minutes after getting his first COVID shot. He was in such pain since the shot that his UCSF doctors prescribed a nerve block shot. But in order to get the nerve block shot, UCSF required him to be fully vaccinated (i.e., 2 shots)! He asked for a vaccine exemption, but the UCSF doctors told him that UCSF doesn’t allow them to write any vaccine exemptions, even for people who almost died after getting the shot. So Tim got another shot in order to get the medical care he needed but this made his pain much worse. Can you confirm whether COVID vaccination is still required to get certain medical care at UCSF? If it isn’t still required, when did the requirement end? Can you explain the rationale for requiring vaccination to give a shot? Do you deny treatment to people with life threatening conditions if they are not fully vaccinated? How vaccinated must they be to be treated? 2 shots? 3 shots? I just talked to Tim and he will be delighted to sign a HIPAA consent to allow UCSF to talk about his case and all his medical records publicly so everyone can learn what happened to him. Are you proud of the way he was treated? Do you have any regrets?
If you believe that COVID vaccine and masks are effective, why would you subject a patient to have to be vaccinated before receiving medical care? This is nonsensical in light of the Cleveland Clinic study which clearly showed that vaccines increase risk of getting COVID which would seem to put the staff at higher risk. You are clearly ignoring that study. On what basis? Nobody has been able to debunk the study. The precautionary principle of medicine requires that you hold off your vaccine requirement until you can resolve the ambiguity.
How many UCSF staff have died within 6 months of receiving a COVID vaccine shot? Were autopsies done? Did they do the histopathology studies to rule out the COVID vaccine as a cause of death? Can we see the slides?
How many UCSF staff have been seriously injured from the COVID vaccine?
Why didn’t any doctor at UCSF file a VAERS report on the vaccine injuries of , Jan Maisel, and Angela Wulbrecht. This is required by law. was a former Chief Medical Officer at UCSF. Maisel is Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF. Wulbrecht was a top UCSF nurse. All of their injuries were required by law to be reported, yet no VAERS reports were filed. Why not? What are you doing to correct the problem?
UCSF ultrasound technicians with decades of experience have seen an unprecedented number of menstrual irregularities in women who have been vaccinated. Why aren’t any of them warning the public about this? Is the public better off if nobody knows about this?
I talked to one of the funeral homes used by UCSF. They are seeing a 20X higher rate of perinatal deaths after the COVID vaccines rolled out. This is a disaster. Why isn’t anyone saying anything about this? Why did the funeral director decline to be named for fear of being fired? Why isn’t UCSF just publishing the numbers to warn the community? How does keeping this information secret result in superior clinical outcomes?
Nearly all of the UCSF neurologists know that the COVID vaccines have caused serious injuries to huge numbers of UCSF patients. Can you explain why none of them are speaking out publicly about what they are observing in the clinic?
Why not make public health information from the hospital public? The information can be easily anonymized to protect privacy. Wouldn’t making medical records such as age/admission date/COVID vaccine dates/reason for admission be a huge public service? If the vaccine really works, everyone would know it. If the vaccine doesn’t work, everyone would know it. Why don’t we have data transparency?
Is anyone at UCSF calling for data transparency from the CDC? If the death-vax records were public, we could instantly know whether the shots are beneficial or harmful. Is there a reason these records are not public and nobody at UCSF is calling for these records to be made public? Do we get better health outcomes when the CDC keeps the data from public view? The data can be easily anonymized to satisfy any HIPAA requirements. I personally released a subset of the death-vax records from Medicare. So I know it can be done. Oh, and it showed the vaccine were causing an enormous amount of excess deaths.
How long do you think you can get away with hiding all these vaccine injuries from public view?
Is this really in the public interest to keep all this stuff secret and engage in fear and intimidation tactics? Is there a paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal showing superior patient outcomes when the public is kept in the dark about vaccine injuries?
Additional actions
On March 20 at 9:50pm I sent this email to Dr. Adler and cc’ed his assistant:
Summary
These should be easy questions for UCSF to answer, but they are ducking my questions for some reason. I just can’t figure it out. I don’t want to spread misinformation, and I’ve offered to correct any questions if they will supply evidence that I’m wrong, but all I hear is silence.
It’s not just me who wants answers to these questions. Pretty much all my readers want to know the answer too.
More importantly, I’d guess that most of the people who work at UCSF would want to know the answer to these questions as well.
But apparently UCSF management and the mainstream media don’t think any of these questions are important.
I wonder if any members of the UCSF Health Leadership Team are curious about the answer to any of these questions. And if not, why not? Do all of them think secrecy is the best way to go? Which questions do they not want to have answered and why? I’ve emailed Dr. Adler and I hope he will respond.
They can’t keep running from the truth. The longer they avoid answering these questions, the worse they look.
Some day there will be accountability. You can bank on that.
Government-backed Digital Money to Represent $213B in Payments by 2030
By Lucas Mearian
Digital currencies backed by government banks still face a mountain of challenges before they’ll be ready for prime time, but 114 countries are involved in various projects, either in the planning stage or all-out pilots.
The global value of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will grow dramatically from $100 million today to $213 billion by 2030, once the virtual money gains greater adoption for domestic payments, according to new data from Juniper Research.
By 2030, 92% of the total value transacted through CBDCs around the world will be paid domestically, as cross-border payment systems face an uphill battle for adoption, Juniper predicted.
The digital currency, which is backed by traditional fiat cash such as the US dollar or British pound, can bolster financial inclusion because customers don’t have to have a bank account to hold them; they can instead use encrypted “digital wallets” that exist in the cloud, on a desktop or laptop, or even on USB storage device.
With a cross-border CBDC payment system, immigrants, for example, could send money back to their countries of origin without having to pay what can be exorbitant fees for electronic money transfers. Businesses would also be able to make cross-border payments for goods and services with much cheaper, and faster, settlements.
Central-bank-backed digital currencies would also reduce the costs of printing and replacing mone, help improve fraud detection, and allow money paid to scammers to be more easily traced and recovered, according to Lou Steinberg, former Ameritrade CTO and managing partner at cybersecurity research firm CTM Insights.
“It would simplify and speed up cross-border payments and reduce the cost and complexity of processing checks, wires, etc.,” Steinberg said in an email reply to Computerworld. “Unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, a currency that is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States or other trusted government would provide certainty that the value of the currency is being carefully managed. A government can adjust everything from the money supply to interest rates as they manage and maintain the value of a fiat currency.”
Digital currencies also eliminate the anonymous nature of consumer cash transactions. In places such as China, where spending activity is closely monitored, that would let the government know what movies an individual is buying tickets for of whether they are spending money at a bar. Those are hard to track with cash.
The US has been a slow follower compared to other nations, such as China and its digital Yuan, in developing a CBDC. Australia, China, Thailand, Brazil, India, South Korea and Russia already have pilots or will begin test programs this year. By 2030, the Bank of England and UK Treasury are planning to launch a digital pound or ‘Britcoin’ CBDC.
It matters which nation’s digital currency achieves widespread adoption first because that government will be able to set the global rules for most others, according to Steinberg. “Whomever sets up large international payment systems first will have a de-facto standard, one which latecomers will have to adopt,” he said. “The US continues to study a digital dollar while others are making progress. We need to prioritize a system for international payments and settlement based on a digital dollar, almost the equivalent of a next-generation SWIFT network.”
The features and standards can be used to design in privacy or state surveillance and traceability. They can include limited use currency, such as a type of dollar that could only be used for stimulus but not saved, or a digital dollar food stamp.
“On the other hand, countries like Cuba have two types of currency, and limit the use of one type to foreigners only (so they know which of their citizens are collecting money from foreigners),” Steinberg said. “If we want western standards around privacy, we need to set the standards. If we want the dollar to maintain its role as a ‘reserve currency,’ we need to set the standards around cross-border networks. Showing up late to the game means you play by some else’s rules.”
All together, 114 countries representing 95% of global GDP are investigating the creation of CBDCs, according to the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. Only 10% have launched general CBDC networks. Sixteen percent of projects are in pilot stage, 30% are in development, and 27% are still in the research stage, according to the Atlantic Council.
“We are behind. The good news is that we are starting to realize this,” Steinberg said of the US.
This map by the Atlantic Council shows the maturity of CBDC projects around the globe.
In March 2022, for example, US President Joe Biden issued an executive order calling for more research on developing a national digital currency through the Federal Reserve Bank, or “The Fed.” The order highlighted the need for more regulatory oversight of cryptocurrencies, which have been used for nefarious activities such as money laundering. The Fed has been investigating the creation of a CBDC for years.
US lawmakers have also introduced bills that would allow the US Treasury to create a digital dollar. The electronic dollar would allow people to make payments using tokens on mobile phones or through cards instead of cash.
In November, the New York Federal Reserve Bank began developing a wholesale CDBC prototype. Named Project Cedar, the CBDC program hammered out a blockchain-based framework expected to become a pilot in a multi-national payments or settlement system. The project, now in phase 2, is a joint experiment with the Monetary Authority of Singapore to explore issues around the interoperability of the distributed ledger.
Juniper Research’s Maynard believes China will lead both domestic and cross-border CBDC use in 2030, “as it has had early pilots which have seen some success in the market.”
Since CBDCs are issued by central banks, they will be mainly targeted at domestic payments at first, with cross-border payments arriving as systems become established and links made between CBDCs used by individual countries. Crucial to CBDC success, however, will be cross-border and retail merchant acceptance.
CBDCs will also require a complex regulatory framework including privacy, consumer protection, and anti-money laundering standards, which need to be made more robust before adopting the technology, according to the Atlantic Council. Any new system of payment could also jeopardize the national security objectives of the country using them.
“They can, for example, limit the United States’ ability to track cross-border flows and enforce sanctions,” the group said. “In the long term, the absence of US leadership and standards setting can have geopolitical consequences, especially if China and other countries maintain their first-mover advantage in the development of CBDCs.”
Steinberg agreed, saying a fully distributed system has risks, “both that wallets will be electronically pick-pocketed, and that transaction validity (consensus) can be cheated. A well-designed system could be quite secure today and future proofed. A poorly designed one would lead to widespread theft and fraud,” he said.
The research by Juniper said to date there is still lack of commercial product development around CBDCs, with few well-defined platforms for central banks to leverage — a big limiting factor for the current market.
“While cross-border payments currently have high costs and slow transaction speeds, this area is not the focus of CBDC development,” said Nick Maynard, Juniper’s head of research. “As CBDC adoption will be very country specific, it will be incumbent on cross-border payment networks to link schemes together, allowing the wider payments industry to benefit from CBDCs.”
For success, any CBDC platform would need a full end-to-end financial network, including wholesale capabilities, digital wallet, and merchant acceptance, Juniper said.
Full end-to-end CBDC solutions, including wholesale capabilities and – most importantly – widespread merchant adoption central banks to generate buy in. That will mean leveraging platforms from experienced payments vendors, as well as having a public consultation model which involves key stakeholders at every stage.
“In order to achieve merchant adoption, it’s a chicken or egg scenario to an extent,” Maynard said. “Merchants will want to use the platform users are transacting in, but users will want to use the platform their favourite merchants and brands are on. As such, it will likely require a mix of incentives at both the user and merchant level to generate initial traffic.”
One of the challenges for central banks is figuring out how to enable a CBDC that adds value above existing payment systems, according to Gartner Research. The success of CBDCs also depends on “programmability” enabled by smart contracts, Gartner argued in a January report.
“In order to further justify investments into CBDCs, developers are experimenting with injecting programmability into CBDC-enabled payment value chains,” Gartner said. “Therefore, bank CIOs need to prepare for this transformation,”
As part of ongoing pilots of the digital Yuan, or e-CNY, for example, the Bank of China Chengdu is using smart contracts to manage the deposits for extracurricular school activities, such as field trips to museums. Using the e-CNY CBDC reduces reliance on third parties to deal with a refund if a class is canceled, or a student couldn’t attend, Gartner said.
Countries such as Russia and China see how payments that depend on US infrastructure and currencies can be affected by sanctions and are working to develop alternatives, Steinberg said.
“The one to watch is China,” Steinberg said, referring to the mBridge Project. “Domestically, they need to keep electronic payments from all moving to tech companies, and undoubtedly see benefits in increased consumer surveillance. Internationally, they piloted cross border payments and settlement with central banks in places like Thailand and UAE. That’s the current concern.”
