The Biden administration’s plan to study whether to launch a digital dollar may bring together some strange bedfellows: banks and crypto companies.

It isn’t yet clear what the administration’s statement seeking to “explore a US Central Bank Digital Currency” and its potential to work “in a manner that protects Americans’ interests” might mean in practical terms. A CBDC could work in a number of different ways. But both traditional deposit-taking lenders and some upstart digital currency companies have had worries about what would happen if US dollars become digitised in ways that might enable them to move or be stored independently or on a government-owned network.