This book is the first of its kind in several overlapping and rapidly developing fields that now dominate news headlines among them the fields of cryptocurrency digital payments platforms fintech and central bank digital currencies CBDCs. With crypto and fintech now threatening to transform finance in destabilizing and antidemocratic ways and with China and other nations now digitizing their national currencies in the form of CBDCs that make the US dollar and national payments infrastructure look ever more quaint and outmoded this book shows both why the US and other democratic commercial societies must and how they can democratically digitize their currencies their national payments systems and the authorities that respectively issue and administer them in the US the Federal Reserve System the Fed.