e-krona
Sweden's central bank digital currency project: started because cash was disappearing, shelved because nobody was in a hurry.
The Riksbank kicked it off in 2017. Sweden was among the countries where cash was vanishing fastest, and the central bank asked an awkward question: what happens to the state's role in money once the only central bank money the public can hold stops being used? From 2020 it ran a technical pilot with Accenture, built on a distributed ledger where participating banks operated their own nodes in a simulated environment.
The pilot was mostly useful for showing what was hard: offline payments, privacy, and who pays for the wallets. A government inquiry concluded in 2023 that Sweden did not need an e-krona for now. The work continues as contingency planning, while the conversation has drifted towards the ECB's digital euro and Swish's position as de facto national infrastructure.