From the 7th of April to the 9th, the European Central Bank spoke extensively about the Digital Euro, expressing hope about its potential and publishing an update of its rulebook. Its President, Christine Lagarde, also called for it, wishing to end European reliance on international payment solutions providers such as VISA, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe and others.
I’m really hyped for this but in typical EU fashion it’s taking years.
Not to mention how long it will take for cardreaders & ATMs / cash machines to be updated to work with this.
I can see this taking a long time, so as long as they move the whole infrastructure forwards, together, then it will better than developing the “eumasterpayvisapalcard” and then thinking about the end devices…
Unfortunately they bought into this right around the bitcoin hype, so I expect the entire project to become a wasteful slog that nobody has any real use for, except for maybe gambling on exchanges, like most cryptocurrencies.
A digital euro that requires no banks or payment processors definitely has a use. It’s all the benefits of cryptocurrency but with the backing of a central bank.