EU committee backs ECB digital euro in 43-14 vote

The digital euro has taken six years to reach the pilot stage, and it arrives in a crowded field. BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, and Rabobank have all backed Wero, a bank-funded digital wallet that has 50 million users, raising questions about whether Europe is developing two solutions to the same strategic problem. Meanwhile, Washington rejected its own digital dollar and passed the GENIUS Act to support private, dollar-backed stablecoins, which handled roughly $33 trillion in transactions in 2025.

Europe's payment landscape is fragmented: 15 of the euro area's 21 countries still lack a domestic digital payment solution, and national schemes like iDEAL, Bizum, and Blik create different checkout experiences in each market. Physical cash is also fading — the share of eurozone companies not accepting cash has tripled to 12% over the past three years, according to the ECB.

The digital euro carries mandatory merchant acceptance and mandatory distribution through banks, which could make it a cheaper alternative by letting merchants sidestep interchange fees and settle instantly. But researchers say the case for it isn't obvious to ordinary people, and similar efforts elsewhere have been, in one lawyer's words, "complete and utter flops." Whether it succeeds may hinge on whether consumers and banks embrace a system whose costs they will partly bear — and on whether it arrives before private alternatives become entrenched.