The European Union is accelerating its digital euro work, weighing public blockchains, including Ethereum and Solana, for issuance and settlements by the Finance Times.
The move follows a Dollar Peg token-controlled market, the background to the passage of stable US laws and concerns within European institutions about the role of the euro in digital payments.
The European Central Bank detailed its steady preparations in its third progress update, including the drafting of the Rulebook, a user survey and an innovation platform with around 70 market participants, as revealed in a press release on July 16 and an accompanying report.
In the ECB’s public timeline, the preparatory phase will run until October 2025, after which the governing council will decide on the next step, but issuance still requires EU law according to the central bank’s project page.
Strategic Autonomy is the core policy driver. In April, Executive Committee member Piero Cipollon told the European Parliament’s ECON Committee that the digital euro would reduce structural reliance on non-EU payment rails and support the bloc’s resilient retail payment baseline, as recorded in the ECB’s referral statement and related BIS posts.
These statements constitute the urgency of the legislative path and the policy objective of locking daily payments to central bank money in both online and offline settings.
The boundaries of regulations are already in place. The EU market for Crypto-Assets Regulation, Regulation 2023/1114 came into effect in June 2023.
The Stablecoin provision covering e-Money tokens and asset reference tokens has come into effect from June 30, 2024, and on December 30, 2024, a broader framework for cryptographic asset service providers is in effect for each of the committee’s delegated ACTS portal summary and official journal entry ESMA.
This gradual regime will provide EU authorities with a harmonious platform to oversee euro-denominated tokens and service providers ahead of the launch of the CBDC.
Considering public chains, it means a distribution model that can interface with existing wallets and tokenized assets, and implements scheme rules through intermediaries. As the central bank’s July document clarifies, privacy, holding restrictions and offline usability remain design constraints under the ECB workstream, with no architecture being selected.
The FT report characterizes the Ethereum and Solana investigations as policy launches rather than final choices, consistent with today’s ECB’s technology-neutrality stance.
Europe already has precedents for using public blockchains in institutional finance. The European Investment Bank issued two-year digital bonds of 100 million euros to Ethereum in April 2021, recorded in an EIB press release. The central bank is also bringing the public chain infrastructure of wholesale CBDCs to court.
BIS Project Mariana, Bank de France, the financial authorities of Singapore, and the Swiss National Bank have demonstrated cross-border Forex trading in wholesale CBDCs using the public blockchain Defi Concepts, according to the BIS overview and final report PDF. These experiments do not pre-determine ECB decisions. They show operational patterns of central bank liabilities tokenized in permitted networks.
Governance and compliance rests on scheme rules and supervised intermediaries under MICA, while technology choices form interoperability with tokenized deposits, securities, and stubcoins.
The ECB reiterated that it relies on EU co-learning workers for publication and pointed out external timelines before 2026, as the external timeline reported in May. According to the ECB’s July update, the preparation phase is on track and testing with market participants will continue under the Innovation Platform Framework.
As EU supervisors enforce MICA on Stablecoin publishers and service providers, the policy for EU supervisors to reach SCOPE will reach scope as EU supervisors refine the privacy and offline parameters of potential retail CBDCs.
Public chain assessments are currently active, legislative pathways remain gating items, and no final technology or issuance decisions have been made today.
