S Yash Kalash is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and an expert in strategy, public policy, digital technology and financial services
Governments across the world have been accelerating their efforts to modernize their digital financial infrastructure. Whether through the development of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), stablecoin regulations, tokenized securities, crossborder payment platforms, or digital identity frameworks, the future of economic governance is increasingly programmable. But as this transformation unfolds, a deeper and more uncomfortable question is emerging: who will actually control the digital rails of the global economy?
For many countries, the answer is already troubling. The infrastructure underlying digital assets, including cloud services, blockchain nodes, stablecoin issuance, wallet software, cybersecurity, and analytics is dominated by a small group of multinational technology and financial firms. Even private cryptocurrencies that appear decentralized on paper often rely on a narrow set of validators, custodians, or foreign bank partners in practice. Stablecoins such as Tether USD (USDT) or USD Coin (USDC), widely used across Asia, Africa, and Latin America ultimately depend on US institutions, US law, and US-based reserves.
This concentration of power places governments in a bind. While digital assets promise efficiency, inclusion, and innovation, they also risk ceding control of critical systems that underpin monetary policy, national security, consumer protection, and long-term economic resilience.
The challenge, therefore, is not whether to adopt digital currencies or digital asset infrastructure but whether governments can harness these innovations without becoming dependent on a new generation of foreign tech monopolies.
A foundational step toward digital financial sovereignty is adopting a public digital infrastructure model, where governments build open, interoperable rails and retain control of core architecture while allowing private innovation on top.
India’s UPI (Unified Payment Interface), Aadhaar, and ONDC (Open Network for Digital Commerce) illustrate how public rails can create competitive, secure markets without vendor lock-in. Applied to digital assets, this means national registries, verification layers, and settlement frameworks that all CBDCs, stablecoins, and tokenized asset platforms must conform to.
This approach also mitigates reliance on private cryptocurrencies whose governance, cloud hosting, and custody often sit abroad, ensuring public functions are not dependent on opaque or foreign-controlled systems.
Interoperability, therefore, must be the guiding principle. Systems should use open application programming interfaces (API), global standards such as ISO 20022, and modular components that allow governments to swap out vendors without dismantling the entire architecture.
Digital currencies and assets are not merely financial instruments; they are becoming the rails on which the global economy will move. Countries that build strategically today will shape the architecture of tomorrow’s digital economy
This is equally true for private stablecoins: regulators should require transparent reserve disclosure, standardized reporting, portable identity frameworks, and interoperability with public verification layers. No stablecoin issuer should become a single point of failure for a country’s payment ecosystem.
A more sustainable model is co-development, where governments collaborate with a consortium of domestic fintechs, regulated financial institutions, and select global partners to build infrastructure collectively. This is how the Nordics built digital identity systems; how India’s Digital India Stack was designed. Co-development ensures architectural transparency, builds local expertise, and embeds public policy goals of privacy, inclusion, and competition directly into the design.
It is crucial that countries must treat cloud sovereignty as a financial stability issue, mandating multi-cloud deployments, local data residency for sensitive financial information, and, where necessary, sovereign cloud layers. Since hosting layers are usually concentrated in the hands of three or four global cloud providers, cloud access could be threatened in the event of a geopolitical conflict, sanctions dispute, or cyber incident, potentially compromising an entire national payments or settlement system.
Open-source reference architectures should also become a cornerstone of national strategy. They allow governments to inspect code, validate security claims, and cultivate local developer ecosystems. In the digital asset space, open-source frameworks enable central banks, finance ministries, and regulators to understand exactly how settlement logic, identity verification, and tokenization layers operate.
A final and often overlooked dimension is geopolitics. Digital financial infrastructure, whether public or private, can be weaponized. Stablecoin issuers can freeze wallets. Cloud providers can shut down access. Blockchain governance bodies can change rules. Foreign regulators can influence reserve requirements. Even decentralized networks can be captured by mining pools or validator cartels aligned with foreign jurisdictions.
Governments must design resilient and modular architectures that do not solely rely on foreign partners, in a world where technology is increasingly entangled with geopolitical pressure.
Ultimately, the most important safeguard against monopolistic dependence is building domestic capability while maintaining global collaboration and crossborder engagement. Digital asset deployments should be treated as national skill-building programs, not outsourcing exercises.
Governments should embed engineers into vendor teams, create joint labs with universities, train regulators in distributed systems, and nurture the domestic industry of digital asset service providers, including wallets, custodians, analytics firms, and cybersecurity specialists.
Today, digital currencies and assets are not merely financial instruments; they are becoming the rails on which the global economy will move. Countries that build strategically today will shape the architecture of tomorrow’s digital economy. Those that rush ahead without safeguarding autonomy may wake up to discover that their monetary futures are governed not by elected institutions, but by the technological preferences and geopolitical constraints of others.