Sand Dollar

The Sand Dollar is the Central Bank of Bahamas' retail Central Bank Digital Currency, launched in October 2020 as the world's first fully deployed national CBDC available to all citizens and businesses, designed to provide universal access to digital payments across the archipelago's 700 islands where traditional banking infrastructure is limited.

The Sand Dollar maintains one-to-one parity with the Bahamian dollar, operates through authorized financial institutions and payment service providers who distribute digital wallets to users, supports offline transactions through stored value cards for areas with limited connectivity, and integrates with existing point-of-sale systems enabling merchant acceptance. Strategic objectives include extending financial services to remote island communities underserved by commercial banks, reducing cash handling costs for businesses and government, providing resilient payment infrastructure during hurricanes and natural disasters, and modernizing Bahamas' payment ecosystem.

By 2025, the Sand Dollar is widely used for domestic payments including government benefits distribution, merchant transactions, peer-to-peer transfers, and bill payments. Implementation lessons include importance of merchant incentives for adoption, need for consumer education on digital wallet security, balance between convenience and AML/KYC compliance requirements, and technical infrastructure resilience for island geography. The Sand Dollar serves as proof-of-concept demonstrating CBDC viability for small nations with specific financial inclusion challenges, influencing CBDC designs in other jurisdictions facing similar geographic constraints or banking access limitations.