Before returning to office, President Donald Trump promised to outlaw central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
But Timothy Massad, former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), told CoinDesk Tuesday (May 19) that the market could overrule the White House.
Global market dynamics make a digital dollar inevitable, Massad said during the Digital Money Summit 2026 in London. He added that while the CBDC topic is a sensitive topic in Washington, it is still being considered behind closed doors.
Also at the summit was Mark Gould, chief payments executive at the Federal Reserve. He told CoinDesk a CBDC was not a topic at the moment, but acknowledged that a government-backed digital dollar would be the central bank’s responsibility.
On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump pledged he would block the creation of a CBDC if he returned to office.
“As your president, I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency,” he said.
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In March of this year, the U.S. Senate approved legislation to bar the Federal Reserve from issuing a digital dollar, though that measure is part of a housing bill that could still face pushback in the House, the report added.
Massad said central banking experiments with stablecoins in other parts of the world have quietly forced the U.S. to develop its own government-backed rails for on-chain money. He pointed to Project Agora, a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) digital currency initiative.
“The U.S. is a participant in Project Agora,” Massad said, stressing that the work behind closed doors is continuing despite the government public-facing objections.
“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.”
Speaking with CoinDesk after the session, Massad said that while the Trump Administration will disavow the creation of a formal retail CBDC is off the table, the evolution of tokenized finance will force a government-backed alternative into existence.
PYMNTS wrote last month that the government’s opposition to CBDCs was notable for its timing, given activity surrounding digital currency elsewhere in the world.
“Globally, CBDCs are advancing,” that report said. “China’s digital yuan continues to expand, and at the end of March the People’s Bank of China announced it had chosen 12 new banks to promote the digital yuan, on top of 10 that are already authorized to do so.”
As covered here, the Chinese CBDC effort is happening in tandem with that country’s continuing crackdown on virtual currencies and a ban on stablecoins.
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