North Carolina resists the CBDC tide with new payments ban #CBDCInsights

A new law in North Carolina seeks to ban CBDCs in the state, but there are questions about whether the new legislation is even legal. 

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Privacy and sovereignty concerns over central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) mean that a digital dollar won’t be coming to the US state of North Carolina anytime soon.

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On Sept. 9, the state’s Senate overrode the governor’s veto and passed into law a bill that forbids the state from accepting CBDCs as a form of payment.

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The bill also prohibits the United States Federal Reserve from conducting any “testing” of a digital dollar in North Carolina.

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Given that no major economy has yet to implement a CBDC at scale, and that the US is dead last among G7 nations when it comes to even researching and developing a CBDC, it seems North Carolina’s action is largely symbolic.

“It’s an opportunity for us to send the signal that North Carolina, the ninth largest state in the union, is not interested in a federal central bank digital currency,” State Senator Brad Overcash told the Carolina Journal following the floor vote.

North Carolina’s new ban raises some serious questions about whether these concerns are well-founded, what they mean for financial innovation in the US, and whether the new law is even legal.

What’s driving anti-CBDC “eruptions”

The bill doesn’t particularly come as a surprise, according to Ananya Kumar, deputy director for the future of money at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center — at least since the US House of Representatives passed the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act in May.

That House action made the United States “the only country in the world passing a ban on CBDCs,” Kumar explained to Cointelegraph. Elsewhere, eleven other states, including Texas, have taken up similar proposals in their state legislatures.

Still, there may be good reasons for the US and its individual states to move cautiously.