By Andy Mukherjee Maybe Mark Zuckerberg spoiled it for us seven years ago. Ever since the Silicon Valley czar proposed a new global currency that could meet the “daily financial needs of billions of people,” we imagined that the money best suited for humans and AI agents in the 21st century could only be minted privately — with blockchain technology.

While Zuckerberg’s plans for Libra (later renamed Diem) stalled over regulatory concerns, stablecoins filled the void.

The romance continues. Major financial centers are folding stablecoins into regulated payment frameworks, even though these privately produced 1:1 representations of fiat money — overwhelmingly denominated in dollars — are largely used to trade Bitcoin and other risky cryptocurrencies, or to launder money and avoid sanctions. Analysts forecast that today’s $300 billion market, dominated by Tether’s USDT or Circle Internet Group Inc.’s USDC, may jump to as much as $4 trillion by 2030.

But what if the hype is at least partially misplaced, and technology — while it will be important — won’t decide what makes money tick in a global, cross-border setting? That’s a doubt economists have raised in a new paper, channeling Jules Verne’s 1873 classic . Phileas Fogg, the novel’s protagonist, effortlessly financed his journey with sterling instruments, merely slipping into his carpet bag, as Verne describes, “a goodly roll of Bank of England notes, which would pass wherever he might go.”

Never mind that the Bank was a private corporation back then, only just learning the wisdom of acting as a lender of last resort from Walter Bagehot’s famous 1873 doctrine. “The technology was from the nineteenth century,” Rutgers University’s Michael Bordo and Princeton University’s Carolyn Wilkins write. “The system functioned because property rights, convertibility commitments, and correspondent networks were credible.” Those institutional arrangements still matter, perhaps more than technology. That is why attention is shifting from dollar clones to tokenized deposits. These are standard bank liabilities, except that their transfers can be executed with algorithms. Since everyone already uses bank deposits to settle domestic and cross-border claims, putting them on a programmable platform won’t introduce too many legal complications.

There are other advantages. Unlike stablecoins, deposit tokens carry insurance, and their issuers have access to central-bank liquidity during stress. Money-laundering risks are lower because these tokens won’t trade pseudonymously as bearer instruments on public blockchains. Instead, they would move between accounts across closed, interoperable networks.

Such networks don’t exist today, though prototypes are being tested, with the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá — Greek for “marketplace” — showing promise. Bringing together eight central banks, including five major reserve-currency issuers, alongside dozens of private lenders, the project is trying to introduce speed and efficiency to the $200 trillion-plus annual market of cross-border payments.

The technology powering these transfers isn't as primitive as in Fogg’s time — the telephone was patented three years after his tour ended — but transactions remain frustratingly slow, costly, and opaque. China and the West have competing ideas to speed things up.

Beijing's initiative, from which the BIS dissociated itself, is mBridge. While Agorá recently moved roughly 800,000 Swiss francs ($1 million) across six currencies in a controlled test, mBridge is already handling billions of dollars in commercial transactions, mainly settling them in e-CNY, China's official digital currency.

The difference between the two systems lies in geopolitical intent: Agorá, which has the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a participant, preserves correspondent banking as the global payment backbone, whereas mBridge seeks to bypass it to undercut Washington’s role in policing international finance. Although the Chinese-backed network is still ahead, Saudi Arabia’s recent departure deals a blow to Beijing’s ambition of using the platform to chip away at the petrodollar and gradually shift more of the Middle Eastern energy trade to the e-CNY.

The People’s Republic put the power of the state behind the e-CNY, developing it as a direct liability of the central bank — similar to banknotes. But as the challenge from Zuckerberg’s Libra yielded to the threat dollar stablecoins posed to monetary sovereignty, China shifted gears this year, changing the instrument's legal status to resemble tokenized commercial bank deposits.

In other words, both the West and China are now looking to their banks — and not Big Tech — to emerge victorious in the race for the future of global money. The modern-day Phileas Fogg will still need speedy transportation to make it back home in time. But as long as he can buy his elephant in India or secure his ship mid-Atlantic by spending coins whose value no seller questions, he wins the bet.

To contact the author of this story: at amukherjee@bloomberg.net