Whitepaper

Numerous countries are investigating and implementing their own versions of central bank digital currencies (CBDC). CBDC represent a new form of electronic money that, unlike well-known cryptocurrencies, are issued by central banks of certain countries. CBDC 2.0 is the second step in the evolution of CBDC issued digitally by one or many central banks using blockchain technology, interoperable and programmable by design. News and updates in this area arrive every day from different sources. It makes a hard task for economists or enthusiasts to track the status and analyze historic trends. CBDC Tracker is an open-source project aimed at providing a comprehensive information resource for world CBDC initiatives. CBDC Tracker components are: Dashboard, CBDC Information Card, Timelines and Time Slider, News Aggregator, Watchlist Tool.

CBDC Tracker is a web resource that is intended to become a central point to access information about CBDC in different countries. By collecting the information from several sources and presenting it in a structured way, CBDC Tracker makes it easier for a wide audience to stay tuned to the latest news in the world of CBDC. The project also strives to popularize the idea of CBDC and thus make one more step towards the future of money. CBDC Tracker not only depicts the current view of digital currencies status in different countries, but also provides a historical perspective on how the process evolved. The data used by the project is continuously updated, both manually and automatically. Any user can also subscribe to receive news and updates as soon as they arrive. It is worth mentioning that the CBDC Tracker Web App is an open-source project. With this, CBDC Tracker is open for collaboration and contribution to share knowledge and technology for the benefit of the whole community.

The dashboard is what you see first when you open the CBDC Tracker website. The main components of the dashboard are: a world map with colors showing the current CBDC status in each country, a data table that supports sorting and controlling visible columns, a filters panel, latest news, and a time slider. The data table is the main component of the dashboard. It contains data rows for each CBDC with configurable columns. Some of the columns are fixed and cannot be hidden: Digital Currency, Country/Region, Central Bank(s), Announcement Year, Status, Update rate. The Update rate column is a graphical representation of a CBDC activity for the last 12 months. It is in a form of a bar chart where each bar represents the monthly activity (the number of news plus the number of updates) for a CBDC.

Each CBDC has its own page, accessible from the dashboard when you click on any row in the data table. On the CBDC page you can see: a complete list of CBDC attributes, news related to this CBDC, and a timeline.

The internal data model of CBDC Tracker is not just a static list of digital currencies and their attributes. Instead, it comprises a series of updates where for each attribute value there is a corresponding timestamp (month and year). This structure gives us the possibility to attach time dimensions to all the depicted results and shows how CBDC adoption evolves throughout the world. For every CBDC, we can view a detailed timeline where data updates and especially status changes are visually placed on the time axis. We can see when a story of a certain CBDC begins and what happened to it until today. Another interesting feature is the time slider control. By using it, you can drag the time thumb to anywhere in the past and immediately see the picture (the world map and the data table) at this point of time.

News are regularly uploaded to CBDC Tracker from multiple open sources. Depending on the approach that is used by the source (static pages, REST API, GraphQL, etc.) the corresponding news iterator is selected. The algorithm loops through the latest news until it finds an article that has already been handled during the previous invocation. The new articles are then processed by the news data extractors, which are configured according to the source article page structure. News general data, such as title, date, abstract, etc., along with its URL and source is then stored to the CBDC Tracker database. The extracted data is also labeled with currency tags, which is currently done by searching for CBDC related keywords within an article content. A news item can be related to several digital currencies.

The watchlist tool allows you to select one or more CBDCs of interest by clicking on star icons in the data table. Then you can open the Watchlist page and see information for only the selected CBDCs. Watchlist is stored in your browser. When you return to the site, you can use the same watchlist.

CBDC Tracker provides an API that can be used by external resources to access CBDC-related data. With this API, CBDC Tracker can serve as a common data source for financial analytics or content resources. The main advantages when using the CBDC Tracker API include timely updates of data and news, historic data views, consistent data structure, and data preparation with built-in algorithms that will evolve in further versions. The CBDC Tracker API includes the following endpoints: digital currencies data retrieval API, news feed API, and timeline API. API specifications are available at the CBDC Tracker GitHub project.