China’s digital yuan may be the largest central bank digital currency (CBDC), but a digital euro is coming.
European Union Commissioner for Financial Services Mairead McGuinness announced Feb. 9 plans to introduce a bill creating a digital euro next year, according to Politico.
Based on current experiments, that means an EU CBDC could launch as soon as 2025. The EU has been largely bullish on a CBDC for several years. Notably, European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde announced on Twitter in July that the bank had “decided to move up a gear and start the investigation phase of the digital euro project.” We have decided to move up a gear and start the investigation phase of the digital euro project. In the digital age people and firms should continue to have access to the safest form of money – central bank money. https://t.co/sGdxTiipsU — Christine Lagarde (@Lagarde) July 14, 2021 She added, “in the digital age people and firms should continue to have access to the safest form of money — central bank money.”
In September, Lagarde said demand for a digital currency is there, and “we should respond to that demand and make sure that we have a solution that is European-based, that is secure, that is available under friendly terms, that can be used as a means of payment at reasonable terms … and does not jeopardize the whole banking system, which should be part and parcel of the proposal.”
Read more: Tackling Privacy Concerns Would Be Key to Ensuring Digital Euro Is Embraced by EU Citizens
Privacy remains a key for the EU, whose General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is among the strictest and most expansive data privacy laws in the world.
In the U.S., anyone expecting answer or even strong opinions from the Federal Reserve Bank’s long-awaited white paper on a U.S. digital dollar, “Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation,” was disappointed, Darrell Duffie, a professor of management and finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, told PYMNTS this week.
See more: A CBDC in the US Will Take Years, but Some Benefits May Come Earlier
“… the United States needs to move ahead, get the technology right, and make a decision later about whether to use a central bank digital currency,” Duffie said.
But he pointed out that “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said more than a year ago that it’s […]