BIS: Digital Cash Can Match Physical Cash Privacy, Not Yet Production-Ready

The BIS is reframing privacy as an engineering problem rather than a trade-off to be negotiated, which matters because it undercuts the common assumption that digital cash must sacrifice anonymity. The bank data breach caveat is the sharper point: privacy at the transaction layer can be undone by custody and infrastructure, so the design question extends beyond the ledger. Whether central banks treat this as a deployable standard or a research aspiration is the open question, and it shapes how retail digital cash competes with existing private payment rails.