I've been in crypto since 2012 or so but they were talking about the digital RMB (or CDBCs, as they call them) even as early as 2014. There were talks about making a "digital dollar" similar in concept in the US back then, too.
Skip ahead to now, it looks like China actually got it done while we're still struggling to figure out a regulatory framework that would even allow people to work on it - god, I still remember when they outright banned crypto in Hawaii and basically took my family's money. And what for? There wasn't even any point, other than a vague fear of change.
This is a good example where a lot has changed over the last 10 years, very rapidly. And it's becoming clear that China changed for the better - America for the worse. Lots of people will probably still be denial, but the reality is that we're falling behind in more ways than one.
Given how handcuffed most public tech organizations are right now, it's hard to see the US catching up any time soon, at least when it comes to an official USD coin. Bitcoin (BTC) is decentralized but is too slow/expensive to be a payments system; Ethereum (ETH) has gatekeeping issues and after their failed "merge" and unreliable L2s, is no longer a contender in many places; Dogecoin (DOGE) had their brand single-handedly ruined by one guy (and is still not fast enough for business use, anyway), and Solana (SOL) is run by literal crooks who have been caught rugging people red handed (yet their fans keep on asking for more).
You have to keep in mind that during the hype cycle of 21'-22' where the industry was receiving a lot of attention, a lot of people tried crypto out, found it to be inadequate and moved on, then the markets crashed shortly thereafter. It's not as complicated as a lot of people make it out to be - it was merely the markets giving a referendum on what they thought the asset was worth. A similar thing happened in Japan during the 17'-18' where they integrated Bitcoin in their payments system but eventually dropped it due to lack of usage/utility (in Japan, crypto adoption is one of the lowest in the developed nations today). The bear market is not a result of misinformation or lack of education - but rather, the result of people knowing what crypto is currently capable right now. (Which is to say, it still has potential, but not quite there yet.)
Now the digitized version of the RMB has the potential to corner 30-40% of the global market if enough people decide to switch off of the USD - which could realistically happen now, given how crazy America's fiscal policy has become in recent months. The criticism of DRMB's is that - like all CDBCs - it's government-controlled and centralized, but that's the whole point - it's made to be a digital version of the national currency, no less, no more. In a way, the reason why the CDBCs never really took off in the US is because there were enough options in the crypto markets that were pegged to the USD already - it was still the world's standard and reserve currency, after all.
So CDBCs are just a "just trust me bro" contest between nation states - which do you trust more? America, or China? (There have been talks about the US government using Ripple (XRP) or Stellar (XLM) as a payments layer that could potentially compete against China's DRMB - but even if they figure out how to wade through the regulatory mess that exists now (likely to take years), it has one big problem: in order for people to trust these frameworks, they need to also be able to trust the government sanctioning it as well. And in that regard, the USD backed CDBCs and stablecoins are not looking like they're on the upswing now, to say the least.
The irony is that blockchain and crypto-based technologies were designed to be one thing - "trustless" - the idea that you could verify something in an objective way, WITHOUT having to trust some random profile on the internet. That's the whole reason why the technology was invented to begin with, going all the way back to Bitcoin and Satoshi. Over time, the ethos of that and the virtues of decentralization seemed to have waned over time - leading to things like CDBCs and blockchain projects that claim to be decentralized but only in name.
"Trust me bro" coins are everywhere in crypto, especially in L2s where most of them are verifiably centralized - often run by literally 1 person. None of these projects will survive contact with due diligence, since if someone is thinking of going with a "trust me bro" currency, they're probably going to either choose the USD, RMB, the Yen, or Euro - where it's backed by something more than 1 algorithm and cheap marketing.
So this is where projects like Tezos (XTZ), Decentraland (MANA), Gridcoin (GRC) [and a few others, these are just the ones I know] where their governance models are visibly decentralized. By visible, I mean not just technically, but you can see people actually talk and post about their participation in the democratic process - it resembles how politics works in the real-world, where people bring their opinions to the table and campaign for people to vote a certain way. The fact that you can see it unfolding in real-time (and immediately look up voting records on the blockchain itself) helps to bring a lot of validity to the process that many other places simply don't have. Show, not tell - that's the essential core of what "trustless" systems entail - it acknowledges that human as flawed by design, but through the separation of powers - maybe we can manage to keep each other in check.
So all of this is very abstract and most of it went over the heads of people during the bull run - well, mostly because people were there to try to get rich quick and for other reasons unrelated to the tech itself. But given the instability of the dollar right now, there is likely to be a renewed interest in the technology, precisely because the world has been so reliant on the USD and its waning will force a lot places to look elsewhere.
Most places will probably just go to other fiat currencies for "trust me bro". But for some people using the RMB may be unthinkable politically, but at the same time, they may have seen the Euro and Yen struggle and that doesn't make them feel safe, either. So what other options is there? Gold/silver? Commodities like wood or wheat? Seems a bit old-fashioned and eccentric, to say the least. Crypto is at least an option out there that can be accessed from anywhere, can be used globally, interest earning (in the more advanced ones at least), and is kind of futuristic and new.
As always, the future will come down to what people decide to do next. Maybe it's stating the obvious, but the next few years will be key in how the world economy shifts - regardless of what happens, nothing will be the same.