Experts Comment: Is The Digital Euro The Future Of Money Or The End Of Financial Privacy?

Money is changing, whether we want it to or not. Cash use across the eurozone has been declining for years, digital payments have become the default for most transactions, and the infrastructure carrying those payments is increasingly owned by companies outside Europe.

Nearly two-thirds of euro area card transactions are now handled by non-European firms. In 13 countries, there’s complete reliance on international payment schemes with no domestic alternative.

For Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB’s Executive Board, that statistic is the whole argument. In speeches earlier this year, he made the case that a digital euro isn’t optional, it’s essential. Without a public, European-owned digital currency, he argues, the continent’s monetary sovereignty will be quietly eroded by Big Tech payment platforms and private stablecoins operating outside central bank oversight.

The ECB is now in its preparation phase, with legislation expected in 2026, pilots potentially beginning by mid-2027 and issuance targeted for 2029. The “if” debate is largely over. The “what kind” debate is just getting started, and it’s a heated one.

Two Sides Of The Same Coin

The pro-CBDC argument is fundamentally a sovereignty argument, and it has merit. Europe currently depends on payment infrastructure it doesn’t control, and that dependency carries real economic and geopolitical risk.

A digital euro would offer a public alternative to private payment rails, potentially at lower cost – merchant fees could drop to roughly half current levels according to ECB projections – with universal access and offline functionality designed to preserve the privacy properties of physical cash.

Proponents also point to financial inclusion – across the eurozone, there are populations underserved by traditional banking. A digital euro with guaranteed access and no requirement for a bank account addresses that gap directly. And the geopolitical timing is noteworthy: European leaders called for accelerated development in October 2025, explicitly citing stablecoin risks and rising geopolitical tensions. The message was clear: this is no longer just a monetary policy conversation.

However, the critics aren’t fringe voices. Members of the European Parliament have raised formal concerns, and they centre on questions that don’t have comfortable answers.

The first is privacy. The ECB’s offline functionality only covers small transactions – anything of meaningful size flows through regulated intermediaries, which by law must verify identities, monitor transactions and retain records under EU anti-money laundering rules. The ECB describes this as pseudonymisation and frames it as privacy protection. The distinction that critics draw, however, is between anonymity and pseudonymity: the latter can, under the right circumstances, be reversed. That’s a practical concern that depends entirely on who controls the infrastructure and what future rules permit.

The second is programmability. A digital currency can be programmed – money that expires, money restricted to certain categories, money that can be withheld based on compliance rules. In the hands of a trustworthy government, that’s a feature. In any other scenario, it’s an expansion of state power over individual financial behaviour that no democratic mandate has explicitly authorised.

Where Does The Rest Of The World Stand?

The transatlantic picture sharpens the stakes further. The Bank of England is still in the design phase for a digital pound, with a decision expected post-2026 and legislation required before any rollout.

The UK’s approach to digital currency regulation has been cautious, prioritising private sector innovation alongside public infrastructure. The US position is stark: a Senate provision passed in March 2026 bans retail CBDC issuance until at least 2030, with the Fed explicitly prioritising private stablecoins over a public digital dollar.

That divergence sets up a real contest between two fundamentally different visions of what money should look like – one public and state-backed, the other private and market-driven. For fintech founders and operators building across both markets, that’s a concrete policy debate. It’s an infrastructure decision they’ll need to build around, and the shape of that infrastructure is being decided right now.

We asked a group of experts across banking, regulation, crypto and consumer rights to weigh in on the most consequential financial debate of 2026.

Our Experts:

• Lissele Pratt: Co-founder of Capitalixe and Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree
• Martin de Rijke: Head of Growth at Maple
• Riccardo Spagni: Entrepreneur and Open Source Contributor
• David Parkinson: Founder and CEO of Musqet
• Joe David: CEO of Nephos Group
• Anthony Yeung: CCO of CoinCover

For any questions, comments or features, please contact us directly.

Lissele Pratt, Co-founder of Capitalixe

“The digital euro is essentially Europe catching up with reality. Cash is disappearing with online payments exploding, and right now the euro relies heavily on foreign systems like Visa and Mastercard. That’s a risk. If a private stablecoin suddenly became dominant and then collapsed, the fallout could hit the euro itself. That’s the kind of fragility the EU can’t afford.

“However, a well-designed digital euro can fix that. It can preserve privacy through offline functionality and encryption, give people real choice in how they pay, and strengthen banks rather than replace them. Most importantly, it safeguards the credibility of the euro, which is still a pretty young currency having been established in 1999. This is about giving Europe the financial tools it needs to stay independent, resilient and ready for the digital age.”

Martin de Rijke, Head of Growth at Maple

“Fintech is headed in a much bigger direction and the digital euro is part of that story. As payments and financial products become more digital, more programmable and connected to modern internet infrastructure, this evolution is inevitable. From that angle, the ECB’s push makes a lot of sense. Central banks don’t want to lose ground as consumer payment habits evolve due to the rise in private digital currencies.

“That said, the future of fintech won’t be defined by public sector projects alone. A lot of the real innovation is happening in private markets where teams are moving faster and building around real user demand. I don’t think this becomes a winner-takes-all story between CBDCs and stablecoins. More likely, the next phase of fintech includes a mix of public and private digital money serving different needs. A digital euro could help modernise the baseline for digital payments in Europe, while stablecoins and tokenised dollars continue pushing cross-border payments, capital efficiency and on-chain financial products forward.”

Riccardo Spagni, Entrepreneur and Open Source Contributor

“The ECB says the digital euro will be ‘as good as cash in terms of preserving privacy.’ That’s the claim. The reality is that the offline mode, the only version that offers genuine anonymity, is capped at €50 per transaction. Everything above that goes through intermediaries who are required to comply with EU anti-money laundering law, which means identity verification, transaction monitoring and data retention. The ECB says they’ll only see ‘pseudonymised’ data, but pseudonymised is not anonymous. Metadata analysis on pseudonymised payment flows is a solved problem. Intelligence agencies and commercial data brokers have been doing it for years.

“The framing that this is about ‘monetary sovereignty’ is misleading. Europe already has monetary sovereignty. What the ECB doesn’t have is a direct window into retail transactions, which currently flow through commercial banks and card networks. A digital euro changes that.

“I’ve spent over a decade building privacy-preserving financial systems. The lesson from that work is simple: if the architecture allows surveillance, surveillance will happen, regardless of what the policy documents promise today. Policies change. Governments change. But infrastructure persists. The question isn’t whether the people running the ECB today have good intentions. The question is whether you’d trust every future government with the same infrastructure.”

David Parkinson, Founder and CEO of Musqet

“Calling the digital euro ‘essential’ for monetary sovereignty conflates two different things: control over payment infrastructure versus control over the currency itself. The euro’s sovereignty already rests on legal tender laws and the ECB’s mandate, not on whether citizens hold balances in a retail CBDC. What a digital euro really does is extend state control deeper into retail payments.

“A retail CBDC hard-wires every transaction into an identity-linked, fully digital ledger, making cash-like anonymity impossible. Once programmable central bank money exists, the constraint on what can be done with it becomes political, not technical. Future governments can add controls on who may spend, on what, where and when, turning money into a policy instrument rather than a neutral settlement asset.

“If the ECB’s goal is genuine sovereignty, citizens need credible exit options from any single issuer. Bitcoin delivers the opposite of a CBDC: fixed issuance, decentralised validation and true self-custody, giving users a base layer for sovereign savings that cannot be quietly reprogrammed.”

Joe David, CEO of Nephos Group

“The digital euro debate has shifted from ‘if’ to ‘when’, but the more honest question is ‘why.’ Central banks frame CBDCs as essential to monetary sovereignty, yet the real threat to sovereignty isn’t stablecoins or Big Tech – it’s poorly designed state-controlled alternatives that erode the very trust they claim to protect.

“From our work with crypto-native businesses across the UK, UAE and beyond, we see the gap between CBDC ambition and operational reality daily. Businesses already navigate a maze of digital asset regulations. Adding a central bank digital currency without clear tax treatment doesn’t simplify anything – it adds another layer of complexity to an already fractured landscape.

“The private sector has already built faster, cheaper, more transparent payment rails. Rather than competing with that innovation, central banks should be focused on regulating it properly.”

Anthony Yeung, CCO of CoinCover

“The debate around the digital euro should not just be framed as digital innovation versus privacy or stability. The overarching question is how a new form of digital money can be introduced in a way that is secure, resilient and trusted by the people expected to use it.

“CBDCs may offer potential benefits like faster payments and more efficient cross-border transactions, but that alone won’t win over sceptics. To date, $350 billion worth of Bitcoin has been irretrievably lost, with wallet access cited as the foremost reason. None of a CBDC’s benefits will matter if users and institutions remain exposed to loss of access, operational failures or unclear recovery mechanisms. If the infrastructure isn’t built with security and recovery in mind from the outset, trust will remain fragile.

“For any digital currency to gain meaningful adoption, whether public or private, it must be supported by robust safeguards that protect access and enable recovery when things go wrong. The real test isn’t whether a digital euro is technically possible. It’s whether it can deliver confidence as well as convenience.”

For any questions, comments or features, please contact us directly.