First place where CBDC came under my radar was when the unrests in Myanmar started. I worked back than into organization that was working on Interoperability project between mobile money providers. We had a guy on field, before the junta took over, that wad pushing for this project to be adopted. Then the Junta came, they were on the other side. So at some point we had a request to make AIRDROPS to few millions wallets at the same time. The system we were building couldn't deliver that, because it is central-ledger and back then wasn't fast enough to achieve that. So they went to USDT: https://cointelegraph.com/news/myanmar-shadow-government-declares-stablecoin-usdt-an-official-currency And guess who was leading the initiative for “interoperability” between mobile money and micro finance in Myanmar? A project created by notorious Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, called Mojaloop. https://www.uncdf.org/article/6113/rfa-enabling-interoperability-for-low-income-people-in-myanmar-building-a-production-grade-mojaloop-integration-platform-to-facilitate-a-covid-19-response The company that was leading the core team development was/is called Modusbox. They split recently to two companies. One is still working on the Mojaloop project. I am not sure did they keep the name of one of their entities. https://modusbox.com/a-case-study-in-interoperable-payments-in-myanmars-microfinance-industry-part-2-standardizing-digital-loan-repayments/ So they split to PortX and Modusbox. PortX is doing basically connectors between banks and other community financial services and making sure they are Mojaloop ready. https://portx.io/news/portx-launched-as-new-entity-by-modusbox-and-secures-10m-in-new-funding-for-total-combined-17-5m-series-a/ Now we are getting to the saucy part. FEDNow. The Federal Reserve Instant payment solution is tightly working with PortX and Modusbox. When I was still working as a contractor for Modusbox in 2018 they were in a meeting with FED. https://portx.io/fednow-early-adopters-are-enabling-instant-payments-innovation-with-the-federal-reserve/ And let me close the circle with the CBDCs. Mojaloop became separate foundation during Covid for lots of reasons. But are still dependent and influenced by BMF. Also some of the Modusbox employees started working at Mojaloop foundation when Modusbox was struggling financially. Recently they opened a CBDC center of excellence. https://mojaloop.io/mojaloop-foundation-launches-the-mojaloop-cbdc-center-of-excellence-in-singapore/