The European Union speeds up the work on a digital euro and weighs public block chains, including Ethereum and Solana, on issue and settlement, according to the Financial Times.
The step follows the passage of the US legislation and a market that is dominated by Dollar-Pegkens, a background that expressed concern within European institutions about the role of the euro in digital payments.
The European Central Bank has a fixed preparation in detail in its third progress, including the preparation of Rulebook, user research and an innovation platform with around 70 market participants, as announced in the press release and the corresponding report of 16 July.
The public timeline of the ECB states that the preparation phase runs until October 2025, after which the Board of Directors will decide on the following steps, while issue still requires EU legislation, according to the Project page of the Central Bank.
Strategic autonomy has been the core policy program program. In April, board member Piero Cipollone told the Econ Committee of the European Parliament that would reduce a digital euro the structural dependence on non-EU payment rails and support a resilient retail payments basic line for the block, as laid down in the introductory statement of the ECB and related BIS posting.
These comments are in line with the urgency of a legislative path and the policy objective to anchor daily payments in central banking money in both online and offline institutions.
The regulatory perimeter is already in place. The EU markets in crypto-assets Regulation, Regulation 2023/1114, came into force in June 2023.
Stablecoin provisions for e-money tokens and asset-referred to Tokens have been in force since 30 June 2024, and the wider framework for crypto-asset service providers has been in force since December 30, 2024, per ESMA, the portal summary of the committee and the official news.
This staged regime gives the EU authorities a harmonized platform to supervise euro-mixed tokens and service providers prior to each CBDC launch.
Considering public chains implies a distribution model that could communicate with existing portfolios and tokenized assets and yet to maintain rules for schedules through intermediaries. Privacy, Houd limits and offline usability remain design restrictions under ECB work flows, and no architecture has been selected, as the central bank’s documentation makes clear in July.
The report of the FT characterizes the exploration of Ethereum and Solana as a policy opening instead of a definitive choice that matches the ECB’s technology-neutral attitude today.
Europe already has precedents for the use of public block chains in institutional financing. In April 2021, the European Investment Bank spent a two -year digital bond of € 100 million on Ethereum, documented in the EIB press release. Central banks have also tested infrastructure for public chain for wholesale CBDC.
BIS project Mariana, with the Banque de France, the monetary authority of Singapore, and the Swiss National Bank, demonstrated cross-border FX trade with wholesale CBDCs using Defi concepts on a public blockchain, according to the BIS overview and final report PDF. Those experiments do not hunt ECB decision; They show operational patterns for tokenized central bank obligations on permissionless networks.
Governance and compliance would purchase schedule and supervise intermediaries under MICA, while technology selection would be interoperability with tokenized deposits, effects and stablecoins.
The ECB has repeated that issue depends on EU-Co-Wetterslators, and external timelines point to a political deal not earlier than 2026, as Reuters reported in May. The preparation phase remains on schedule, according to the July update of ECB, and testing with market participants takes place in the context of an innovation platform.
The policy is that Ethereum and Solana brings in reach as EU Supervisors enforces mica on stablecoin emissioners and service providers, and since the ECB refines privacy and offline parameters for a potential retail CBDC.
The assessment of public chains is now active, the legislative path remains the port item and no final technology or issue decision has been taken today.