The politics of central bank digital currency is one conversation. The structured records the pilots are producing quietly, on the way to that conversation, are a completely different one. A private-client file does not need an opinion on the first to make use of the second, and the two are worth keeping in separate rooms until the reader has decided which one they came for.
A retail design and a wholesale design are not the same instrument for a monitoring desk. Retail leaves marks at the wallet and merchant layer. Wholesale leaves marks in the plumbing between institutions. The two produce different footprints and answer different questions, and treating them as one topic is the first mistake we watched other people make.
The pattern we watch for first is not the transaction. It is enrolment; who signs up for the pilot. Which merchants accept it; which corporate treasuries put their name on a proof of concept. Enrolment is public far more often than settlement, and enrolment quietly tells you who is already thinking in this shape.
The working assumption for most of the subjects a desk of this shape covers is simple. Within a few years, at least one currency they touch will run on a rail a standing report has to read. The desks getting ready for that now are not doing policy work. They are getting the connectors ready, one country at a time.