What if a CBDC race fragments the global payment system?
A fragmenting CBDC race is a mild payment-rail shock, so the modeled move is a small dollar-confidence haircut — gold/bitcoin slightly bid, long end up a touch, with ETH softer as competing sovereign rails crowd it. Rhymes with the early e-CNY rollout and cross-border mBridge pilots that nudged settlement away from SWIFT at the margin. Forward angle: CBDCs threaten correspondent banking and stablecoins more than they threaten the dollar's reserve status, so the real loser is private payment intermediaries, not Treasuries.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 3–10 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A central-bank-digital-currency race fragments the global payment and settlement system. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Dollar/reserve confidence ▼ · Crypto confidence ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.