Central-bank digital currencies are talked about more than coming to fruition

In 1992 the Bank of Finland, the country’s central bank, launched a curious card called Avant. It looked like a debit card, except that it was meant to replicate the properties of cash. The money stored on an Avant card was backed by the Bank of Finland rather than a commercial bank, which made it, the bank claims, the world’s first central-bank digital currency (CBDC). Cardholders did not have accounts with the bank. Instead their monetary value was tracked by chips physically inserted into them. As with cash, that meant that users were anonymous. Avant ran for three years before being privatised and later discontinued. It saw little uptake compared with other payment channels, such as credit cards with reward points. And it failed to make money.