The bill will serve as the legal foundation for the European Central Bank’s ongoing technical work on the virtual version of a euro banknote or coin. Providing reasoning for this step, ECB Executive Board member Fabio Panetta said: ‘If we don’t satisfy this demand, then others will do it’.
The ECB is currently carrying out in-house experiments with the digital euro and expects to start working on a prototype at the end of 2023. Eurozone governors will then decide whether minting a digital euro is worth the trouble. If they do, the virtual currency could be ready by 2025 — at the earliest. That timetable works fine for the EU’s legislative process. The bill will have to go through negotiations within EU capitals and Parliament before it can become law.
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