ECB's Cipollone: digital euro is about payments sovereignty

European Central Bank board member Piero Cipollone has framed the digital euro as a question of sovereignty rather than technology. In an interview with Italy's Milano Finanza, republished by the ECB on Saturday, he said the bloc depends too heavily on outside companies for payments, Cointelegraph reports.

What he said

Cipollone compared payments with energy and defence, two areas where Europe found it could not rely on others. "If we are critically dependent on third parties, it's not easy to ensure this smooth functioning," he said. He did not name the third parties, but in an April lecture in Latvia he noted that two-thirds of euro-area card transactions run through non-European companies, a clear reference to the big US card networks.

He stressed that sovereignty does not mean shutting anyone out: it means "having the power to choose".

The timetable

• 2027: a pilot with real transactions by ECB and national central bank staff. 36 market operators, seven of them Italian, are helping prepare it, and the ECB is inviting e-commerce and mobile-commerce firms to join.
• End of 2026: Cipollone hopes EU lawmakers adopt the digital euro regulation, which the ECB Governing Council needs before it can decide on issuance.
• 2029 at the earliest: a possible public launch.

ECB President Christine Lagarde set out the same 2027 pilot plan at the IMF earlier this month.

Our take

The sovereignty pitch is the strongest argument the ECB has, and the most honest one. A digital euro is a central bank digital currency, not a crypto asset: it would not compete with bitcoin so much as with Visa, Mastercard and dollar stablecoins, which Europe already regulates under MiCA. The hard questions are elsewhere: whether consumers want it when instant bank payments already exist, how strict holding limits will be, and how privacy is protected. Until the regulation passes in Brussels, the 2029 date is a hope, not a schedule.