While numerous countries have been advancing their CBDC projects for many years, nearly all of them are still far from making a final decision about issuing a CBDC or not. Our explanation is CBDC involving far too many tradeoffs: prioritizing some objectives (1st “dimension”) necessitates specific design choices (2nd “dimension”) that make another long list of objectives impossible to achieve (3rd “dimension”). Modeling these tradeoffs in a systematic manner has been lacking from the CBDC literature. We contribute on this front by building a CBDC Design Toolkit, available to interested readers on request. After applying this toolkit to two country cases, we uncover more than a dozen of tradeoffs that each of the country authorities has not covered in their CBDC-related official publications. This demonstrates in a structured way why so many CBDC projects have stalled after early enthusiasm. It also partially explains why there are so many different views on CBDC and why emerging economies have been more active on this front.