ECB’s Stournaras: Digital Euro Aims to Strengthen Sovereignty and Resilience

29 September 2025

By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – European Central Bank Governing Council member Yannis Stournaras on Monday said that the digital euro was designed to bolster monetary sovereignty, ensure universal access to safe digital money and enhance the resilience of the European payments system.

Speaking at the Crypto-Research Conference in Athens, Stournaras, who heads the Bank of Greece, said that the rise of crypto-assets and stablecoins had transformed the financial ecosystem and highlighted the risks of regulatory fragmentation.

“The stablecoin sector only constitutes a $250 billion market today,” he said, noting that $27 trillion had moved through stablecoins in the past year, more than Visa and Mastercard combined.

But, he cautioned, the crypto world had largely developed in a “regulatory vacuum” and carried vulnerabilities similar to those of traditional finance, often amplified by new technology.

Stournaras argued that legislation such as the EU’s MiCA framework and the DLT Pilot regime would improve conduct obligations and consumer protection, but warned that divergent approaches across jurisdictions risked regulatory arbitrage.

“[T]here is an obvious need for a global effort to harmonise rules and ensure a sufficiently level playing field,” he said.

Turning to payments, Stournaras observed that crypto instruments had gained little traction in euro area retail transactions, where trust, safety and broad acceptance were prerequisites.

Still, interoperability with existing infrastructures and new regulation could increase stablecoin use, he said.

Against this backdrop, central banks had to play a more proactive role, he argued. The digital euro would reduce dependence on non-European schemes, guarantee free access to a public payment instrument, and serve as a resilience tool in emergencies.

It would also foster innovation by enabling banks and payment institutions to build services on top of it, he said.

Stournaras pointed to Eurosystem projects linking European retail payment rails with those of India and Southeast Asia as part of a broader effort to expand the euro’s international role and support the G20 agenda on faster, cheaper cross-border payments.

He also highlighted exploratory work on wholesale settlement using distributed ledger technology, with the Bank of Greece actively involved. More than 200 transactions with a total value of €1.6 billion had been completed in 2024, he said, and the Eurosystem would pursue both a short-term interoperability solution and a long-term DLT-based European hub.

“Central banks are a vital part of the new reality,” Stournaras said. “They remain vigilant and are taking bold actions that embrace innovation … while they aim to ensure financial stability, monetary sovereignty and public trust.”