Former CFTC Chair: U.S. Is Quietly Building CBDC Infrastructure Despite Trump's Public Ban!

Former CFTC Chairman Timothy Massad dropped a pointed disclosure at the Digital Money Summit 2026 in London: despite Washington's loudly hostile public stance on central bank digital currencies, U.S. officials are quietly exploring CBDC-style infrastructure behind closed doors — including active participation in the Bank for International Settlements' Project Agora, which brings together seven central banks.

Massad, who chaired the CFTC from 2014 to 2017, argued that global tokenization trends make a government-backed digital dollar inevitable. "We don't have a central bank president who is going to get out there and speak about wholesale or retail CBDC, but that does not mean that we are not looking at how to create one," he said. The Federal Reserve's Mark Gould, also present at the event, declined to address a central bank stablecoin directly — but acknowledged that if a…