The Sand Dollar Heard Around the World

October 2020. The world is busy with COVID, US elections, and Zoom fatigue. In the Bahamas, the central bank flips a switch on something nobody else has ever done. It launches the Sand Dollar, the first nationwide central bank digital currency. Real money, issued by the central bank, but living entirely as digital tokens on phones.

It's not a big country. About 400,000 people, scattered across hundreds of islands. That's actually the point. After Hurricane Dorian flattened parts of the country in 2019, ATMs and bank branches were offline for weeks. A digital currency that works on a basic phone, with or without a bank account, suddenly made sense.

Then something interesting happened. Other central banks started watching. Closely.

By 2024, the Atlantic Council's CBDC Tracker counted 134 countries representing 98 percent of global GDP in some stage of exploring a central bank digital currency. The European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the People's Bank of China, the Federal Reserve. All of them studying, piloting, or quietly hoping the others go first.

What is this thing, why now, and what could go wrong? That's the module.