The Federal Reserve’s triennial study captures a system digitalising under state stewardship: whoever controls payment infrastructure data controls the currency.
Every three years the Federal Reserve conducts its Federal Reserve Payments Study, the broadest statistical survey of payment flows in the United States. On 1 July 2025 the Board of Governors published the initial results of the 2025 edition, covering transactions that took place in 2024. Full data will be released in subsequent phases, but the first tables already offer a detailed map of where US retail payments flow.
Digital payments are growing at the expense of cash and paper-based instruments. Cheques and physical transactions are ceding ground to electronic transfers, cards, and real-time payment systems. The ACH network (Automated Clearing House) and the FedNow service – launched by the Fed in 2023 – occupy an increasingly central position in the settlement architecture. According to the study’s preliminary data, the direction is clear: the US payment system is consolidating around infrastructures managed or overseen by the central bank.
The study makes no explicit mention of a digital dollar (CBDC), but the architecture it describes forms its technical and institutional substrate. FedNow is already a real-time settlement system operated directly by the central bank; extending it to an account accessible to private individuals would be, from an engineering standpoint, a relatively short step. The distinction between a highly capillary centralised payment infrastructure and a fully fledged CBDC becomes, at that point, a matter of political definition rather than a technical one.
