Egypt Is Building a Digital Pound to Curb Bitcoin

Egypt is answering a bottom-up problem with a top-down tool. The country’s currency has cracked repeatedly this decade, and Egyptians responded the way people under inflation usually do: they looked for something the state couldn’t print. Now the Central Bank of Egypt is building a digital pound — and says one of its reasons is to pull people away from the crypto that slide drove them toward.

The e-pound is a central bank digital currency: a state-issued token that is the pound, not a claim on a private bank. Officials have moved it from research into a proof-of-concept phase, with a broad rollout targeted around 2030 under a national roadmap tying it to financial-inclusion goals — getting active e-wallets to tens of millions by the end of the decade.

Why Egyptians reached for crypto

The context is a currency that has lost the public’s confidence. After the pound was floated in 2024 it depreciated by roughly 40%, one of several devaluations that have eaten savings in real time. Peer-to-peer bitcoin trading has climbed sharply through those shocks, conducted on informal platforms and messaging groups because formal crypto activity sits in a legal grey-to-red zone.

Estimates put Egyptian crypto ownership in the low millions of wallets — a meaningful base for a country where the central bank has warned against digital assets for years. The demand is defensive, not speculative: a hedge against a pound that keeps losing purchasing power, the same instinct visible from Beirut to Buenos Aires.

A CBDC digitizes the pound. It does not fix the reason people left the pound.

The tell in the mandate

What makes Egypt’s project notable is how openly the motive is framed. The central bank has repeatedly cited, among its reasons for exploring a CBDC, the goal of curbing the use of cryptocurrencies. The e-pound is being positioned not only as a modernization of payments but as a competitor to the exits — a state rail meant to keep money inside the state’s field of view.

That is the crux of the bitcoin contrast. A digital pound is still a pound: same issuer, same monetary policy, same devaluation risk, now with programmable, traceable rails. Bitcoin’s pitch to an Egyptian saver is the exact inverse — a fixed supply, no issuer, and a balance the central bank cannot inflate, freeze or watch by default.

The counterweight

The state’s case is not empty. A well-built CBDC can widen access to digital payments for the unbanked, cut cash-handling costs, and route subsidies more efficiently — real benefits in a country pushing hard on financial inclusion. And bitcoin’s volatility is a genuine cost for anyone using it to store a month’s wages, which is why dollar stablecoins, not bitcoin, carry most of the region’s crypto volume.

But a token designed to keep savers loyal cannot answer why they left. Until the pound holds its value, a shinier version of it competes with bitcoin on convenience while conceding the one thing bitcoin holders actually want. The e-pound is a 2030 project chasing a problem Egyptians are solving today, on their phones, without permission.

Editor’s note: the e-pound is in a proof-of-concept phase with a rollout broadly targeted around 2030; timelines and inclusion targets come from central-bank statements and the 2024 national roadmap. The ~40% depreciation follows the March 2024 float; crypto-wallet and P2P figures are secondary estimates. Stablecoins, not bitcoin, dominate regional crypto volume. Nothing here is financial advice.