In a panel on Monday called “Upgrading Money to the Digital Age: Introducing Digital Euro,” participants agreed that the current task was firstly one of getting everyone onboard with the specifics of a digital euro, putting any real implementation well into the future.
According to cointelegraph, Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), have been a greatly famous topic of debate in the last few years, but particularly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Austėja Šostakaitė of the European Central Bank stated that the ECB wouldn’t even be making a decision on whether to pursue a digital euro in earnest until the middle of 2021, which contradicts an estimate of January that the ECB’s president made at the beginning of this month. At this time, Šostakaitė noted that the question was “How do we introduce euro into the ecosystem and how does it collaborate with commercial bank money?”
An advisor to the Swedish Riksbank, Carl Andreas Claussen stated:
“There are some legal questions and this is such a big issue that we cannot decide on this. We need some political backing. We suggested to the parliament that they should have an expert committee looking at this.”
Sweden is part of the European Union but not the Eurozone, meaning that it retains its own currency. Additionally, cash usage in Sweden is among the lowest in the world, which means that the country has something of a jump on digitizing currency.
Regarding the euro itself, Šostakaitė said that “If we see foreign CBDCs, or maybe Facebook coming into the Eurozone, that may accelerate things.”
