Not sure this will go anywhere (the technical challenges are formidable), but if they succeed, other countries will likely follow suit:
"Researchers at the Functional Nanomaterials and Devices Laboratory at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology are working on putting a memory device into banknotes.
As in the U.S. $20 bills, the purpose is to cut down on counterfeiting, but unlike them, the Saudi system has some electronics on board. It can send an RFID radio signal to a scanner, and it contains some nonvolatile memory that can store a record of it every time it’s scanned.
The research is described in a new article in the Wiley journal Advanced Materials. The article is titled “High-Performance Non-Volatile Organic Ferroelectric Memory on Banknotes,”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/embedded-systems/trackable-banknotes-at-last
"Researchers at the Functional Nanomaterials and Devices Laboratory at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology are working on putting a memory device into banknotes.
As in the U.S. $20 bills, the purpose is to cut down on counterfeiting, but unlike them, the Saudi system has some electronics on board. It can send an RFID radio signal to a scanner, and it contains some nonvolatile memory that can store a record of it every time it’s scanned.
The research is described in a new article in the Wiley journal Advanced Materials. The article is titled “High-Performance Non-Volatile Organic Ferroelectric Memory on Banknotes,”
https://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/computing/embedded-systems/trackable-banknotes-at-last