Digital euro can ward off a host of private payment service ills: ECB official By Cointelegraph

The European Central Bank (ECB) is quite happy with the European Commission’s legislative proposals for the digital euro. ECB executive board member Fabio Panetta told the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs in a speech on Sept. 4 that the proposals “put Europe at the forefront of advanced economies” in central bank digital currency (CBDC) development, potentially heading off private dominance of the financial sector and the ills that implies.

The European Commission (EC) made its proposals public on June 28. Panetta, a critic of cryptocurrency, called the EC proposals for the euro CBDC “a new paradigm for preserving monetary sovereignty” that would ensure Europeans always have access to a public payment option, whether it was cash or digital, even as “closed-loop solutions are becoming increasingly prevalent” in private payment services. Panetta compared private payment systems to private messaging, where users are pressured to join the most popular systems.