Disrupting Global Money? Public–Private Entanglements and the Geopolitics of Multicurrency CBDC Platforms

This article investigates how competing institutional approaches to connecting national central bank digital currency (CBDC) systems may reconfigure global monetary relations. While most analyses of CBDC projects assume that central banks and private financial actors hold inherently conflicting interests, this article starts from the premise that central banks have historically built their monetary capacities by cultivating strategic relationships with selected private financial institutions. This is particularly relevant in the domain of global money, where national monetary authorities rely heavily on the relationship constituted by private global banks within correspondent banking networks to connect their monetary system to the rest of the world. Against this backdrop, the article compares two flagship multicurrency CBDC platforms that advance contrasting principles of institutional coordination for processing wholesale cross-border payments: Project mBridge, comprising the People’s Bank of China and other Asian and Middle Eastern central banks, advancing a public–public model based on cooperation among central banks; Project Agorà, featuring the Federal Reserve and other closely aligned central banks, promoting hybrid arrangements between central banks and major private financial institutions. Building on the expanding literature on the geo-economic role of private global banks, the article argues that these competing institutional models reflect not just alternative preferences for organizing global monetary relations but fundamentally different geopolitical priorities. While mBridge aims to reduce reliance on the private correspondent banking relations that underpin the current USD-centred global monetary system, Agorà seeks to reinforce the institutional foundations of that very system.