The financial landscape in Jamaica

Jamaica’s banking sector is among the most profitable in the world, not because of extraordinary management or a flourishing economy, but because of an entrenched oligopoly in which two dominant banks effectively control and collude in the market (Mooney, 2018). The deeper roots of this structure lie in Jamaica’s colonial banking history, and its particular form of racial capitalism (Robinson, Reference Robinson1983) within which access to credit and financial services has long been restricted to lighter-skinned and wealthier segments of the population, while the majority – mostly Afro-descendant – have been systematically excluded from formal financial circuits (Monteith, Reference Monteith2008; Hudson, Reference Hudson2017).

Contemporary measures of financial inclusion reflect these enduring inequalities. According to the BoJ, 22.8 percent of Jamaicans remain unbanked, and a further 6.3 percent are underbanked (HCI, 2023). Given the settings of my ethnographic fieldwork, only a small number of my interlocutors were fully unbanked – most held at least one account with a formal bank – but the underuse of mobile wallets and digital payments was pervasive. According to institutional reports, less than 5 percent of the population uses mobile payments frequently (more than 3 transactions per week), and nearly 70 percent of all transactions are still conducted in cash (CAPRI, 2022; HCI, 2023).

These patterns reflect the broader stratification of Jamaican society, where income inequality remains high and poverty levels have historically been highly volatile, rising and falling in response to external economic shocks (World Bank, 2024). Access to the internet and mobile technology, a prerequisite for mobile payments and CBDC adoption, reproduces these divides. Roughly one-quarter of Jamaicans lack reliable internet access, while this figure rises to three-quarters for low-income households (CAPRI, 2022). Mobile data remains costly relative to wages, further expanding the divide in the use of digital payment platforms.

Jamaican society is structured by hierarchies of race and class position that intersect to reproduce inequality (De Noronha, Reference De Noronha2020; Kelly, Reference Kelly2024; Thomas, Reference Thomas2004). Racial designation in Jamaica has never been determined solely by phenotypic traits such as skin color. Rather, racialization has historically been tied to assessments of social and occupational practices, expectations of respectability, gendered behaviors, and historically conditioned relationships to land, labor, and community. As Thomas (Reference Thomas2004) notes, categories such as whiteness, brownness, Indianness, Chineseness, and blackness are never given, but emerge relationally, depending on social relations and income, from land ownership to marital relations (Thomas, Reference Thomas2004: 101–102). While it is true that lighter-skinned elites continue to be overrepresented in positions of power in banking, business, and the state, racial stratification in Jamaica operates through institutional judgments about respectability, risk, and legitimacy as much as through visible markers of shade (Hossein, Reference Hossein2016; Kelly, Reference Kelly2020). Financial exclusion must therefore be understood not simply as a matter of poverty or geography, but as the outcome of historically sedimented racial capitalism, in which access to credit, mobility, and trustworthy personhood is unevenly distributed along lines of color, class, gender, and proximity to the state and financial institutions (Mullings, Reference Mullings2022).

In this context of intersectional and racialized financial inequality, the Bank of Jamaica chose to pioneer a CBDC. The stated rationale was to contribute to both the digitalization of the economy and to increase financial inclusion (Haynes, Reference Haynes2020; Ministry of Finance and the Public Service, 2021). While most central banks plan at least four years in research, piloting, and phased design before issuing a retail CBDC (Di Iorio et al., Reference Di Iorio2024), the Jamaican case stands out for the exceptional speed with which it progressed from concept to implementation – in about 2 years between the announcement in March 2020 and the official launch in August 2022.

The flow of information around the CBDC from the central bank to the general public has been entirely unilateral. The BoJ issued press releases announcing the status of the project only after key decisions had already been taken. If consultations with stakeholders did occur, the public has not been informed about who was involved or what issues were discussed. The decision to adopt the CBDC did not involve any democratic consultation. Only two sources of research on the BoJ’s CBDC development are publicly available: an interview with the CBDC team published within a broader report on financial inclusion by the think tank CAPRI (2022), and a survey on financial inclusion and payment preferences released in late 2023 commissioned by the Bank of Jamaica, which notably did not include specific questions about JAM-DEX (HCI, 2023).

JAM-DEX is categorized as an ‘intermediated’ (Lavayssière, Reference Lavayssière2022) or ‘hybrid’ CBDC (Auer and Böhme, Reference Auer and Boehme2020; Leucci et al., Reference Leucci2023), constructed in a process within which the central bank issues, validates, and redeems the digital currency while private intermediaries – BoJ-authorized wallet providers – distribute it, onboard users, and manage balances. To create, issue, and redeem JAM-DEX, the BoJ employs Digital Symmetric Core Currency Cryptography (DSC3), developed by the Ireland-based firm eCurrency, which does not rely on blockchain (eCurrency, 2020). This architecture was deemed the most efficient for the BoJ’s objectives: centralized issuance ensures that JAM-DEX creates direct claims on the central bank; the non-DLT model supports already existing real-time settlements with lower energy costs; and the two-tier intermediated structure preserves the role of commercial actors in monetary circulation while limiting central bank visibility over individual transactionsFootnote ³ (CAPRI, 2022). This design was presented as a matter of technical efficiency and scientific neutrality, suppressing political debate about the broader social consequences of configuring digital money in this manner.

The branding of JAM-DEXFootnote ⁴ reflects the ‘botanical imaginary’ that the majority of the central banks and international organizations use to naturalize and depoliticize CBDCs (Swartz and Westermeier, Reference Swartz and Westermeier2023). Its logo features the ackee, a fruit native to West Africa, digitally stylized in the esthetic of video games and cryptocurrencies. This choice is symbolically charged. The ackee resonates with the ancestry of the majority of Jamaicans and, accompanied by saltfish, forms the national dish and a typical breakfast. Yet its cultural significance also derives from danger: unripe ackee is lethally toxic. According to local knowledge, the fruit must ‘smile’ – split open naturally to reveal its seeds – before it can be safely eaten. It is warned that, ‘ackees that do not smile will kill’ (Rashford, Reference Rashford2001). By the end of 2024, less than one percent of transactions on the Zap wallet were conducted in JAM-DEX (Jamaica Observer, 2024). In light of this, it seems that the digital ackee of JAM-DEX may have been opened too soon.

The institutional tensions between public and private money

The first lens I chose to view the CBDC through is an institutional one which highlights the tension between publicly and privately created money. At the core of modern monetary systems, sovereign money is issued by the state and guaranteed by law as legal tender. Central banks provide public money in two forms: cash, available to everyone, and reserves, accessible only to commercial banks and other licensed financial institutions. Alongside this, commercial banks have been granted the power to create sovereign money through lending (McLeay et al., Reference McLeay, Radia and Thomas2014). This form of private money represents the vast majority of sovereign money in circulation today.² E-money adds a third layer to the system, as it is usually a form of money backed by commercial bank deposits. Private banks’ money is formally private, yet it depends on the central bank’s authority to sustain trust in money as a public good.

A broad definition of monetary sovereignty considers it as a state’s capacity to control the creation and circulation of monetary instruments in the present and future interests of its people (Senner, Reference Senner2025). In most jurisdictions, this authority formally resides within central banks, whether national or supranational. Yet monetary sovereignty is never absolute. It is increasingly challenged by the expansion of private digital payment infrastructures that erode the role of cash and shift control over everyday payments to profit-oriented actors (Scott, Reference Scott2022; Peebles, Reference Peebles2021; Brandl et al., Reference Brandl, Hengsbach and Moreno2025), among these large technology firms and owners of cross-border payment platforms that exercise infrastructural power over payments and data (Ortiz, Reference Ortiz2024), as well as domestic and foreign actors that shape country’s debt relations and control key payment systems (Chia, Reference Chia2024). In recent years, the rise of cryptocurrencies has added a new threat to the landscape. Stablecoins, in particular, are widely viewed as a potential threat to monetary sovereignty because they are pegged to sovereign currencies but circulate outside of direct central bank control (The Bank of England and HM Treasury, 2023; ECB, 2023). In light of such developments, many central banks have come to view CBDCs as a tool to reassert monetary sovereignty within an increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem (De Bonis and Ferrero, Reference De Bonis and Ferrero2022; Chia, Reference Chia2024; Westermeier, Reference Westermeier2024). Issued and backed by the central bank, they seek to preserve trust in sovereign money while adapting the retail form of public money, cash, to the digital environment.

In Jamaica, central bank officials have signaled frustration with the limited transmission of monetary policy to commercial banks through the interest rate system (Byles, Reference Byles2024). These concerns intersect with the challenges of high levels of foreign-currency-denominated public debt, which peaked at approximately 142 percent of GDP in 2013 (Clarke, Reference Clarke2024). Although JAM-DEX has never been publicly framed as an instrument to reclaim monetary sovereignty, it can be analytically situated within Finance Minister Nigel Clarke’s (2018–2024) broader strategy to position Jamaica as fiscally disciplined, institutionally credible, and technologically modern in the eyes of international financial organizations and donorsFootnote ⁵ (Clarke, Reference Clarke2024). In this sense, JAM-DEX functions both as an attempt to regain infrastructural leverage over domestic monetary circulation and as a symbolic device through which the central bank performs monetary authority on a global stage.

However, the Bank of Jamaica has been careful to avoid any overt discourse about monetary sovereignty. The BoJ has consistently emphasized that JAM-DEX is not intended to replace cash, nor commercial bank deposits or e-money, but to complement them. Officials have stated that the CBDC forms part of an ‘optimum mix’ of payment instruments from which Jamaicans can choose depending on their preferences and needs (Centrally Speaking, 2021b; 2023b). JAM-DEX is thus framed as complementary, not disruptive. To use the expression of the BIS President, JAM-DEX, ‘it is evolution, not revolution’ (Ortiz, Reference Ortiz, Fassin and Fourcade2021), a new layering in the payment infrastructure (Salzer, Reference Salzer2025). ‘We are giving people options about what they want: some people prefer cash, and some people prefer to go digital’, said the Deputy Governor during one Centrally Speaking episode (2023a). JAM-DEX’s role is to ‘give persons the option to come into the formal financial system by using digital currency’ and to ensure that all Jamaicans, especially the unbanked, have access to ‘quick, safe, and reliable’ payment options (Centrally Speaking, 2021a; PBCJamaica, 2023).

The BoJ has been careful to reassure the banking sector that the CBDC is not a threat to their deposit base but rather a means of reducing the ‘biggest headaches’ of cash management costs for both banks and merchants (Jamaica Observer, 2023; QMPPC, 2024). This messaging positions JAM-DEX as a tool which supports existing financial institutions rather than one which counterbalances their power.

This official narrative has not been accepted by private-sector intermediaries, however. In practice, Jamaica’s two-tiered model requires private wallet providers to absorb the costs of building and maintaining parts of the CBDC infrastructure (from software for interacting with the BoJ to digital wallet apps), while prohibiting them from charging transaction fees on JAM-DEX transfers. Executives at Zap viewed JAM-DEX as an obligation rather than a business opportunity, something they were forced to include in their digital wallet on the central bank’s insistence, but which was ‘too expensive’ (Zap marketing officer, personal interview, November 2023).

These frustrations reflect the asymmetry at the heart of the public-private partnership underpinning the CBDC: the BoJ insists that CBDC distribution must remain free and accessible, while wallet providers struggle to identify new revenue streams to bridge the associated costs. Whilst the private sector is challenged to innovate in order to generate new sources of earnings, (Bank of England and HM Treasury, 2023; Roitman, Reference Roitman2023), Jamaican industry appears insufficiently mature to meet this challenge. From the BoJ perspective, wallet providers using JAM-DEX might profit by using the ‘information and data they never had before’, which could be leveraged to develop new financial products such as microinsurance and micro-investments (Kalilah Reynolds Media, 2022). However, this suggestion overlooks that wallet providers do not need a CBDC for this purpose; mobile or e-money solutions are sufficient to generate data-based revenue (Malala, Reference Malala2019; Maurer, Reference Maurer2012b). JAM-DEX has thus become not only a ‘resource-consuming project for the BoJ’ (Aurazo et al., Reference Aurazo, Banka, Frost, Kosse and Piveteau2024: 23), and therefore for taxpayers, but also a burden borne by the banks that developed the wallets.

For users, the coexistence of e-money and CBDC within the same digital wallets has generated further confusion. Zap’s interface displays two balances – the ‘Zap Balance’ and the ‘JAM-DEX Balance’ – and labels transfers between them as ‘exchanges’. In a society where remittances and foreign exchange are commonly used in everyday life, this terminology led some of my interlocutors to assume that JAM-DEX is a cryptocurrency or that its value fluctuates relative to the Jamaican dollar. The name ‘JAM-DEX’, short for Jamaica Digital Exchange, seeming to evoke the language of ‘decentralized exchange’ used in crypto parlance, prompted a smirk from crypto-enthusiast interlocutors, confirming in their eyes that the central bank had little knowledge of the digital currency space.

From a regulatory standpoint, any fintech seeking to develop a digital wallet must partner with one of the 11 BoJ recognized deposit-taking institutions (CAPRI, 2022). While the BoJ has publicly acknowledged that such a requirement may create a barrier to entry for new fintech firms (QMPPC, 2023), this policy underscores the BoJ’s priority of shielding commercial banks from potential competition.

JAM-DEX has thus created a range of new frictions within the payment ecosystem. The central bank emphasizes inclusion, modernization, and efficiency; providers emphasize costs and economic sustainability; citizens who encounter JAM-DEX are confused by its branding and design and struggle to make sense of its purpose. JAM-DEX aspires to function like cash, a digital public money that is free, universal, and sovereign. However, it cannot fully embody that role without generating frictions within the banking sector. Because the BoJ decided to give banks the same prominent role in promoting JAM-DEX as they already had played in the previous system, the CBDC project has proven neither a disruptive alternative to private money nor a profitable tool for the provider. The first ghost haunting JAM-DEX is its struggle over monetary sovereignty, which has been continually undermined by its dependence on private, mostly foreign-owned, financial intermediaries. This struggle reveals a temporal disjunction: JAM-DEX arrives as a symbol of financial modernity before the private sector is prepared to sustain it, embodying a future which arrives prematurely while the present remains structurally underdeveloped.

Infrastructural exclusions: JAM-DEX makes you broke!

A second way to analyze CBDCs begins by recognizing that, as forms of money, they can only operate insofar as they circulate within payment infrastructures (Maurer, Reference Maurer2012). As forms of financial infrastructure, CBDCs are ‘socio-technical relations’ between human actors, devices, rules, and institutional procedures which shape who can pay, how payments are made, and under what conditions money is recognized as legitimate (Westermeier et al., Reference Westermeier, Campbell-Verduyn and Brandl2025: 3). Infrastructures also have a classificatory power: they sort and define populations, producing distinctions between those who can access financial services and those who remain excluded (Anand et al., Reference Anand, Gupta, Appel and Anand2018; Westermeier et al., Reference Westermeier, Campbell-Verduyn and Brandl2025). As Narula et al. (Reference Narula, Swartz and Frizzo-Barker2023: 18) caution, ‘an important potential risk is that an intermediated CBDC will replicate the design, and therefore the harms, of existing intermediated money forms’.

In Jamaica, this risk must be situated within a longer history in which colonial and racialized hierarchies have shaped financial infrastructures. Colonial and postcolonial banking practices have systematically privileged wealthier lighter-skinned elites, while darker-skinned and lower-income Jamaicans have been excluded from credit and formal financial services (Hudson, Reference Hudson2017; Monteith, Reference Monteith2008). Access to finance has historically been mediated not only by income, but by respectability, proximity to state institutions, and racialized assumptions about trustworthiness (Hossein, Reference Hossein2016; Mullings, Reference Mullings2022). Examining JAM-DEX through an infrastructural lens thus reveals how a project framed to be inclusive and universal enters an already stratified financial landscape. It becomes evident that the CBDC is haunted by the ghosts of racial capitalism (Robinson, Reference Robinson1983), as classificatory logics and inequalities are reactivated within new digital monetary architectures.

In its official communications, the BoJ has consistently emphasized that JAM-DEX will benefit the ‘unbanked’ population (Centrally Speaking, 2021a; 2021b; CAPRI, 2022). Here, the bank relies on the World Bank’s technical definition of the ‘unbanked’ as those without a formal bank account. However, when officials elaborate on beneficiaries, they often highlight micromerchants and informal workers – ‘street vendors, beauticians, juice vendors’ – or participants in pardna, the local term for rotating savings and credit associations (Centrally Speaking, 2021a). By invoking these entrepreneurial figures, the BoJ frames JAM-DEX as a tool to modernize those which scholars have sometimes labeled ‘the productive poor’ and fold them into the formal financial system.

This narrative illustrates how financial inclusion programs in the Caribbean are embedded within logics of capital which render certain groups legible as subjects of reform while making others invisible (Maurer et al., Reference Maurer, Musaraj and Small2018). From the outset, JAM-DEX’s inclusionary imaginary has been bounded by respectability politics and by the aspiration to showcase an industrious, entrepreneurial Jamaica. Those deemed ‘non-productive’ – such as pensioners or individuals whose livelihoods do not align with entrepreneurial ideals – remain largely absent from this imaginary.

The BoJ’s narratives surrounding JAM-DEX also obscure the structural barriers that keep many Jamaicans distant from formal finance. Among the documents required to open a bank account is a proof of address. However, land insecurity is a problematic issue: Jamaica is among the Caribbean countries with the highest proportion of people living in informal settlements, complicating access to property titles and the legal documentation required for financial services (Goffe, Reference Goffe2024). The narrative of inclusion also neglects the entanglements between informality, criminalization, and survival, which mean that informal financial practices are the only viable option for some (Jaffe, Reference Jaffe2013; Hossein, Reference Hossein2016; Thorburn and Causwell, Reference Thorburn and Causwell2025).

Design choices further shape how people encounter the CBDC in practice. The first hurdle is registration. Although a Zap account requires fewer documents than a traditional bank account, the process remains exclusionary: it presupposes stable internet, a relatively new smartphone, and digital literacy. Registration unfolds in six steps: verifying a phone number, confirming personal details, recording a video selfie and audio clip, entering a tax registration numberFootnote ⁶ (TRN), creating a pin, and validating an email. Even under ideal conditions, this process never took less than three minutes for my interlocutors. In practice, the infrastructural demands were often insurmountable: phones lacked data, Wi-Fi was unavailable, cameras were too poor in quality, lighting was too dim, or the app itself crashed or went down for maintenance. Faced with these barriers, many abandoned the process altogether, remarking that the app was ‘asking for too much information’.

In October 2023, I undertook an experiment to test these exclusions directly. For one week, I attempted to live exclusively on JAM-DEX, using the Zap wallet through which the currency circulates. I convinced several co-researchers to join me, but most abandoned the experiment within a day. Their frustrations revealed how impractical it was to rely solely on the CBDC in daily life: accessibility, trust, and usability were constant obstacles. The aim was not to ‘stress-test’ the system in the abstract, but to inhabit the CBDC from the perspective of a lower-middle-income or unbanked person.

Few people knew what JAM-DEX was. Vendors frequently met my request – ‘Can I pay with JAM-DEX?’ – with confusion. Some recognized Zap but not JAM-DEX; most had never heard of it. Interestingly, many shops started to explicitly refuse all mobile payments, citing fraud concerns. Infrastructural mistrust shaped these refusals: Jamaica’s financial infrastructure is viewed with suspicion, with surveillance, scams, and inadequate customer protection looming large (Carabini, Reference Carabini2024a). Topping up the digital wallet also posed a major hurdle. For banked users, transferring funds was possible via bank transfer, but for unbanked users, converting cash to CBDC was difficult and unintuitive. The process required taking cash to an ATM and depositing it to top up the digital wallet. Yet ATMs that support wallet top-ups are rare, if not completely absent, in downtown areas. Across the island, reaching a suitable ATM might require long trips to distant locations. Moreover, unbanked people are unfamiliar with ATMs; they often distrust these machines and find the process of turning physical cash into digital money on a phone unintuitive. Even in businesses that officially accepted Zap, failures were common. At a café, the cashier first claimed the payment tablet was uncharged, then admitted she did not know how to use it. In a punitive workplace culture where employees are forced to personally cover mistakes, sometimes even in financial terms, citing a technical malfunction was a safer option than experimenting with an unfamiliar tool. The BoJ Governor has publicly blamed merchants for JAM-DEX’s slow adoption (Jamaican Observer, 2023), while Zap managers recognize the need for cashier training but lack a strategy to implement it (Zap manager, personal conversation, May 2023)⁵.

The circulation of JAM-DEX also reflected classed geographies (Clarke, Reference Clarke2006). The few shops that accepted Zap were located in uptown Kingston; there was no trace of them in downtown spaces, food markets, or rural communities. In my own week-long trial, I never succeeded in using JAM-DEX itself; I could only use Zap e-money. Critically, conversion between the two required an extra step which merchants had little tangible incentive to make. The need to seek out rare merchants who accepted JAM-DEX meant my week cost almost three times what I usually spent, as I was pushed into higher-priced uptown spaces and was forced to move around with private taxis instead of using the bus. When I presented these findings to Zap’s marketing team, one officer laughed: ‘Zap makes you broke!’ (Zap marketing officer, personal conversation, November 2023).

If everyday frictions with JAM-DEX revealed infrastructural exclusions, the Bank of Jamaica’s promotional campaigns demonstrated how inequality was reproduced esthetically and symbolically (Jaffe and Evans, Reference Jaffe and Evans2022). JAM-DEX was promoted through spectacles – Carnival, cricket championships, uptown fairs, art festivals – intended to graft the CBDC onto the emotional fabric of national life. Yet JAM-DEX remained materially absent from these events: it circulated as a logo on gadgets rather than as a usable payment instrument. In most cases, it was not possible to pay with JAM-DEX at all. Many spectators mistook the logo for a generic design picturing the ackee fruit, rarely recognizing it as money or a payment method. Moreover, though JAM-DEX was promoted as a standalone brand, it can only be accessed through intermediaries like Zap. People cannot search for ‘JAM-DEX’ in app stores, nor do the JAM-DEX logo appear prominently within wallet interfaces. The CBDC circulated symbolically in public space while disappearing in the physical and digital spaces where it was meant to function (Cordes, Reference Cordes2024). These contradictions proved confusing to potential users, as mobile payments, e-money, and the CBDC were introduced in overlapping ways that blurred distinctions among digital payment methods.

Adopting an infrastructural lens highlights how payment systems shape citizenship and belonging through access and exclusion (Westermeier et al., Reference Westermeier, Campbell-Verduyn and Brandl2025). Examining both the mundane details of app use and the BoJ’s communication strategies reveals how barriers of class and race are encoded in the possibilities for JAM-DEX adoption. Although it is framed as neutral and inclusive, the CBDC risks reproducing stratified financial citizenship. The ghosts haunting JAM-DEX are thus forces of classification inherited from colonial finance and racial capitalism. They return in spectral form through infrastructures that appear technical and apolitical, but which continue to sort populations along historically sedimented lines. In this sense, JAM-DEX demonstrates how financial innovation can reinscribe rather than unsettle the racialized and classed hierarchies of Jamaica’s financial system.

Affective hauntings: When JAM-DEX becomes the ‘Mark of the Beast’

Infrastructures work only insofar as they mobilize or assuage the feelings that contribute to generate them (Bosworth, Reference Bosworth2023; Zhang, Reference Zhang2023). Every act of payment is also an affective event, saturated with emotions such as fear, pride, trust, and suspicion (Carabini and Malala, Reference Carabini and Malala2025). In Jamaica, the technical breakdowns of JAM-DEX are inseparable from the affective climates in which they occur: the demand for a selfie during registration evokes anxieties of surveillance; network crashes fuel frustration; rumors of fraud quickly escalate into collective mistrust. These affective registers complicate the technocratic focus on efficiency and inclusion through which CBDCs are frequently understood by showing that the legitimacy of payment infrastructures is built – and often undone – in the realm of feelings. The last lens though which I will analyze JAM-DEX, therefore, is an affective framework.

Jamaica is a profoundly spiritual country where Christianity is ‘intrinsic in the culture and identity of the majority of people’ (Lazarus, Reference Lazarus2016), though its practice is far from homogeneous. The religious field is fecund with new schisms, strands, and reinterpretations of doctrine constantly emerging. Based on the latest census data, millenarian denominations – Christian movements that frame social and political life through an eschatological lens emphasizing the imminence of the End Times – constitute almost half of Jamaica’s Christian populationFootnote ⁷ (The Statistical Institute of Jamaica, 2011). However, the fluidity of the religious landscape makes denominational boundaries porous, and a clear, systematic account of contemporary affiliations warrants further research.

Church affiliation remains a central marker of social belonging (Guano, Reference Guano1994). Uptown elites tend to be tied to Catholic, Anglican, or Baptist congregations – denominations less shaped by Black identity politics – while millenarian and evangelical movements are more prevalent among the working classes and lower-income people (who are also the unbanked), for whom religious cosmologies intersect with everyday struggles of survival.

Anthropologists have long shown that money is also a moral artifact (Parry and Bloch, Reference Parry and Bloch1989; Maurer, Reference Maurer2005; Taussig, Reference Taussig2010). Here, I reinterpret Kwon’s (Reference Kwon2007) provocation on the monetization of morality by suggesting that JAM-DEX becomes a technology through which moral judgments circulate. Rather than merely facilitating payments, the CBDC becomes a medium for distinguishing righteousness from corruption. One of the strongest narratives around JAM-DEX in some radical religious communities rests on its association with the ‘Mark of the Beast’. The ‘Beast of the Apocalypse’ refers to a violent, destructive creature that emerges at the end of time. Such understandings derive from the Book of Revelation and its long and varied history of interpretation. Revelation 13:16–17 declares that:

JAM-DEX becomes interpreted through this eschatological lens; in its status as a state-controlled digital currency, it is perceived as a fulfillment of prophecy. The cashless agenda that it hides is the real purpose of exerting total control over people’s transactions, which will become impossible without submission to ‘the beast system’.

As Auntie Bi., a 72-year-old woman from The Mews affiliated to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, explained to me: ‘Cashless is the Mark of the Beast. With digital currency if I go and buy banana they know I eat bananas, it is about control. But we resist the devil. Jamaica is with Jesus Christ’ (personal conversation, June 2023). In this religious landscape, eschatological interpretations of JAM-DEX collapse financial adoption into questions of salvation and eternal judgment. Peter, a 55-year-old former Adventist, put it starkly:

This sense of peril resonates in a context marked by exploitative economic relations, where many feel that their secular ‘value’ is already extracted for the benefit of the wealthy. What remains under their own control, and therefore non-negotiable, is the care of their soul. As Aunti Bi. explained, ‘They cannot decide what I believe. It’s my soul, I operate in the right. Only Jesus can judge me’ (personal conversation, June 2023).

As Guyer (Reference Guyer2007) argues, millenarian Christianity emphasizes the imminence of the End Times, privileging visions of ultimate salvation or destruction over mundane projections of the near future. Much like in contemporary macroeconomic theories, temporal horizons collapse, leaving everyday practices suspended between the immediacy of the present and distant eschatological futures, while neglecting the proximate future in which ordinary financial infrastructures must operate. Auntie Bi. and Peter’s interpretations exemplify this disjuncture in temporal orientations: the adoption of JAM-DEX is not evaluated in terms of near-term practicalities – paying bills, receiving wages – but against the apocalyptic horizon of eternal salvation and damnation.

The most common religious tabloid repeatedly frames CBDCs as ‘the wicked embrace of the beast and its one-world system of control’ (Freedom Come Rain, 2024), warning that cashlessness will place Jamaica ‘directly in the line of collision with God and His certain judgement’ (Freedom Come Rain, 2023b). International examples, such as the 2022 freezing of Canadian truck drivers’ bank accounts, are cited as evidence that governments could use CBDCs to suppress dissent (Freedom Come Rain, 2023a). These testimonies show how financial practices are transformed into moral battlegrounds, where adoption or refusal of JAM-DEX carries a deep, intimate eschatological weight. Such was the prevalence of this discourse that BoJ central bankers were compelled to release an interview and publicly declare that ‘CBDC is not the Mark of the Beast’ (Jamaica Observer, 2022). However, as Auntie Bi. confirmed, such reassurances carried little credibility given that they came from the same ‘Babylon’ institution that created the CBDC. At the same time, a Zap manager recognized the problem but also revealed that Zap had not addressed it as a priority:

The notion of the ‘Babylon system’ comes from Rastafarianism, which, despite being a minority movement, has significantly influenced Jamaica’s broader cultural idiom and identity (Barrett, Reference Barrett1997). According to the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Allsopp, Reference Allsopp2003), Babylon is an allegory for oppression, corruption, and materialism of the establishment of any Western-style society or government. The term has entered popular speech, providing a symbolic vocabulary that overlaps with millenarian anxieties and vividly frames the state and the financial sector as sites of domination.

These religiously inflected fears intersect with broader cultures of conspiracy. As West and Sanders (Reference West and Sanders2003) remind us, conspiracy narratives are a response to opaque power, and calls for transparency often amplify suspicion. As Muniesa (Reference Muniesa2024) argues, finance itself acts as a resource for conspiratorial thinking, supplying the semiotic and moral materials through which people interpret reality. In Jamaica, where colonial finance has long extracted value from Black labor and where digital inclusion projects like JAM-DEX are read through the lens of suspicion and surveillance, these narratives resonate powerfully. They make visible the eschatological anxieties of value creation that haunt financial imaginaries.

Crypto-enthusiast communities echoed these concerns, framing CBDC as ‘the end of freedom of payment, the end of privacy in payment, the end of freedom of choice’ (Bitcoin maximalist and developer, personal conversation, January 2023). Programmability is seen as the ultimate danger: ‘With CBDC, first of all, they can set an expiration date […] they can decide that you can’t buy meat, alcohol, or tobacco anymore. If they don’t like you, they can deactivate your account, and you have no cash […] CBDC is pure evil for me’ (Entrepreneur, personal conversation, April 2023). Nigerian experiences of currency redesign and restricted access to cash were cited as warnings of how governments might punish dissent by forcing citizens into CBDCs.

Despite this, neither the Bank of Jamaica nor Zap has sought to engage religious communities in their adoption strategies. Millenarian Christianity is expanding in postcolonial contexts, particularly among lower socio-economic groups, reinforcing these eschatological interpretations (Lynch, Reference Lynch2021). Practices such as tithing and church donations already structure much of the financial life of Jamaicans, yet no effort has been made to integrate JAM-DEX into these circuits of value. This omission underscores a fundamental disconnect between the state’s vision of modernization and the socio-cultural realities of monetary practice in Jamaica.

‘Mark of the Beast’ discourse is not reducible to superstition; it operates as an affective critique that makes visible the entanglement of money, sovereignty, and surveillance. It illustrates how temporal disjunctures have shaped the reception of JAM-DEX: the currency is imagined less in terms of its near-future uses than in terms of apocalyptic prophecy or distant projects of governmental control. Anxieties about JAM-DEX are rooted in a long history of the surveillance of Black life, stretching from slave communities in the Caribbean to contemporary forms of bodily control and surveillance (Browne, Reference Browne2015; Page, Reference Page2024). They echo longer histories of dependence on oligopolistic, foreign-controlled financial infrastructures – SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard, IMF conditionalities – that have been weaponized for political purposes (De Goede, Reference De Goede2021). CBDCs, as a monetary innovation, have acquired eschatological significance in Jamaica. Within this genealogy, religious prophecy, conspiracy narratives, and crypto skepticism are not simply irrational fears; they function as affective repertoires through which Jamaicans navigate, resist, and perform their place within financial modernity. Though JAM-DEX is widely discussed among religious communities and crypto enthusiasts, it remains largely absent from everyday monetary life – a currency operating as a phantasmal presence that circulates more as an idea than as a practice (Cordes, Reference Cordes2024).

The ghosts of central bank digital currencies

Like many CBDC projects, JAM-DEX has been presented as a technological step towards a modernized, digital future. When examined ethnographically, however, its adoption in Jamaica demonstrates the limits of a technocratic lens and highlights the need for a pragmatist anthropological perspective that illuminates the social life of money.

I have shown, in particular, how JAM-DEX embodies the frictions between public and private monetary forms and continuous struggles over monetary sovereignty. The BoJ has promoted the CBDC as a public good, a sovereign instrument designed to expand financial inclusion. However, its circulation depends on private wallet providers that treat JAM-DEX as a cost center without direct associated revenue streams. This tension between non-profitable public infrastructure and the profit-oriented logics of the private sector exposes the paradox of attempting to commodify a public good like (digital) cash.

Adopting an infrastructural gaze makes visible how design and adoption reproduce existing racial and class inequalities that have a long history in colonial finance. Registration processes, smartphone and data requirements, ATM top-ups, and merchant acceptance all disproportionately burden those most excluded from the banking system. Rather than dismantling structural exclusion, JAM-DEX can only reinforce stratified forms of racialized inequalities, revealing how they are embedded in infrastructures that appear neutral.

Finally, looking at payments from an affective perspective highlights how moral imaginaries shape financial practice. In Jamaica, eschatological interpretations frame digital currency as part of the Babylon system, with some church movements denouncing JAM-DEX as the ‘Mark of the Beast’. For these believers, financial adoption is not only a technical choice but an existential threat, collapsing questions of utility into matters of salvation. This fear of surveillance and the end of freedom is echoed by crypto enthusiasts, who see in the CBDC the materialization of a tool for total control over people’s financial behavior. Money here is saturated with affect – fear, mistrust, vigilance – that profoundly conditions its circulation.

Taken together, these three cultural lenses reveal the financial ghosts that haunt Jamaica’s CBDC. JAM-DEX materializes the contradictions of monetary sovereignty, reinscribes the postcolonial legacies of racialized inequality, and amplifies affective anxieties about surveillance, apocalypse, and control. To study CBDCs ethnographically, then, is also to confront their ghosts. Making explicit the spectral temporality of JAM-DEX shows that digital money cannot be understood solely through the technocratic gaze of policy frameworks: it is haunted by the unresolved violences of colonial and racial finance and by digital futures that arrive prematurely. JAM-DEX embodies this disjointed temporality, in which the past refuses to disappear, and the future unsettles the present. Like an unripe ackee, JAM-DEX was opened before its time.