The European Union is speeding up its digital euro project and, in a notable shift, officials are weighing whether to issue the token on a public blockchain—specifically Ethereum or Solana—instead of a closed, private system. The reassessment follows the recent passage of the US stablecoin law (GENIUS Act) and a surge in dollar-denominated tokens, developments that have sharpened Brussels’ concerns about the euro’s role in an increasingly tokenized payments landscape.
According to the Financial Times, “people familiar with the matter added that officials were now considering running a digital euro on a public blockchain such as Ethereum or Solana rather than a private one.”
Why The EU Suddenly Eyes Ethereum And Solana
The pivot under discussion marks a departure from years of ECB signaling that emphasized a tightly controlled, privacy-preserving infrastructure run by the Eurosystem and intermediated by banks and payment providers.
The immediate catalyst, European officials concede in private, is competitive pressure: a maturing, US-led stablecoin regime and the network effects of dollar tokens in commerce and markets. Public-chain issuance—if chosen—would aim to maximize reach and composability in the existing crypto economy, albeit while confronting the policy trade-offs that come with transparency on permissionless ledgers.
ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone has repeatedly framed the digital euro as a strategic response to foreign dependence in payments. In a Paris speech this spring he argued that a central bank instrument would “reduce our reliance on foreign providers” and warned that widespread use of dollar stablecoins could erode European banks’ “fees, data and deposits.”
Formally, the ECB describes the digital euro as a “digital equivalent of cash,” free for basic use, privacy-protecting, and universally accepted across the euro area—objectives that are technology-agnostic but stringent in implementation. Whether those goals can be met on a public network will hinge on design specifics: wallet and identity models, on-chain privacy (potentially via cryptographic techniques), settlement finality, and how the two-tier distribution with supervised intermediaries is preserved on open infrastructure. The central bank has not committed to a platform and continues to test multiple architectures.
Public blockchains promise instant integration with the global crypto stack—programmable payments, tokenized deposits, and DeFi-adjacent rails—along with deep liquidity and tooling. But they also surface policy challenges that a private ledger can more readily mitigate: transaction traceability versus user privacy, exposure to network-level congestion or outages, and governance externalities (e.g., protocol upgrades, validator incentives, and MEV) that a sovereign might prefer to control.
EU officials, according to the FT, are working through those trade-offs with a view to preventing the euro from ceding further ground to dollar tokens while maintaining European standards on data protection and financial stability. No final decision has been taken.
The debate over “public versus private” should not obscure a definitional point: the digital euro remains a central bank liability—unlike commercial stablecoins backed by reserves—and would be issued within a legal framework set by EU institutions.
In that sense, the current deliberations are about the rail rather than the nature of the instrument. Still, the rail matters. Choosing Ethereum or Solana would effectively place a euro CBDC alongside the world’s dominant token ecosystems, with all the distribution advantages and regulatory questions that entails.
For Ethereum or Solana, an EU selection would be a powerful catalyst—and a clear signal that public blockchains have reached institutional-grade maturity.
At press time, ETH traded at $4,316.
