The European Central Bank outlined its plans for the introduction of a “digital euro” Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) on Wednesday, which is projected to be implemented throughout the EU as soon as next year.
A presentation from Piero Cipollone, a Member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB), published on Wednesday said that a “digital euro”, which he dubbed “the future of money”, could be made available to the public by November of 2025.
The central banker said that a digital euro would bring cash-like features to the digital world, saying that it would be functional on and offline, would be free for basic use, have “Pan European reach”, would be “respectful of privacy”, and crucially would be issued by a central bank.
“There is currently no European digital means of payment covering all euro area countries: 13 out of 20 euro area countries don’t have a national card scheme and instead rely on international schemes for digital payments, which settle 69 per cent of all digital transactions in the EU,” Cipollone wrote.
“A digital euro would fill this gap, providing a European digital means of payment accessible and accepted in all euro area countries. A digital euro would provide a pan-European platform that would standardise digital payments in the entire euro area,” he added.
The central banker claimed that the introduction of a digital euro CBDC would not mean that other forms of payment, including cash, card, bank accounts, other digital payments would go away.
The presentation also claimed that the ECB plans to build several privacy safeguards into the system, including transactions being anonymised with the central bank only being able to view “a minimal set of pseudonymised data”.
However, other concerns remain about the implementation of CBDCs, particularly surrounding their potential use as a means of social engineering. Indeed, the Bank of England previously admitted that Central Bank Digital Currencies — unlike decentralised cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — would be “programmable“, meaning that the state could potentially decide how and where people spend their money.
For example, a CBDC could feasibly set a limit on the amount of money one could spend on petrol to fill up a car in order to meet EU emissions targets.
Unsurprisingly, the European Central Bank has been heavily critical of Bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrencies that are not under the control of a central bank.
The head of the ECB Christine Lagarde — a lawyer by trade who never worked as an economist — previously declared that she believes that cryptocurrencies are “worth nothing” claiming that their value is “based on nothing, there is no underlying assets to act as an anchor of safety.”
On the other hand, Lagarde has been a chief supporter of a European Union CBDC, saying: “The day when we have the central bank digital currency, any digital euro, I will guarantee it… So the central bank will be behind it. I think that is vastly different from any of those things.”
The European Union is not alone in looking to implement a CBDC, with Rishi Sunak’s Tory government in the United Kingdom working on a “digital pound” and the Biden administration in the United States also working on creating a “digital dollar“. Central Bank Digital Currencies have also been championed by the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF), which listed them on its list of technologies that will “change the world by 2027“.