Frankfurt and London, Tuesday 15 February 2022: The Digital Euro Association (DEA) is delighted to announce its partnership with the UK-based Digital Pound Foundation (DPF). Through the partnership, the DEA believes that enhanced exchange of ideas and cooperation can be created. While the DEA primarily seeks to impact the discussion around a digital euro in the Eurozone, the Digital Pound Foundation focuses on the well designed implementation of a digital pound.
The Digital Euro Association (DEA) is delighted to announce its partnership with Ripple as a supporting partner to jointly work on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Ripple, one of the leading providers of enterprise blockchain and crypto solutions for cross-border payments, has recently developed a blockchain-based infrastructure to support CBDCs and is engaged with Bhutan’s central bank, amongst others, to help execute their CBDC pilot. Ripple is also a member of the Digital Pound Foundation and continues to extend its efforts around CBDCs worldwide. The DEA partnership with Ripple includes, amongst others, joint educational efforts around digital currencies and knowledge exchange.
Regulation of new digital currencies and new payment services will take time. But regulators should now outline the core elements of regulation so that private initiative can design its commercial projects without harming public interests.
A Brief Introduction to MiCA
The Digital Financial Package of the European Council is achieving its objectives. Having concerns to protect investors and financial stability, the Council finally reached an agreement on two regulations namely: The Regulation on Markets in Crypto Assets and The Digital Operational Resilience Act. The first one, MiCA, regulates crypto-assets and crypto-asset service providers in a comprehensive and balanced manner: While it proposes authorization requirements for the issuance of crypto-assets, and the crypto-asset service providers, certain cases are excluded from the scope in order to avoid unnecessary burdens. This article presents a brief outline of what MiCA Proposal (the Regulation or MiCA hereafter)1 offers from a legal perspective.
Hereby, the Digital Euro Association (DEA) announces the DEA Thesis Award, a call for theses on the digital Euro. Paper topics should cover either the public digital euro in the form of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) or the private digital Euro in the form of euro stablecoins, tokenized commercial bank money, etc. Note that this is not a call for academic papers but instead targets student papers that have been submitted at academic institutions all over the world as we want to encourage young students to research these topics. With this first call for papers, the DEA awards the best and most innovative theses around the digital Euro to contribute to our mission of supporting education around the digital Euro.
We are pleased to announce that cLabs has joined the DEA community and is now an active and supporting institutional member.
cLabs aims at creating global prosperity by building financial technology.
cLabs is working on celo, an open-source blockchain for peer-to-peer payments. Celo makes crypto and stablecoin payments accessible on mobile phones. Their stablecoins cUSD and cEUR enable safe and efficient cross-border payments and, thus, intend to foster financial inclusion globally. The DEA is convinced that the partnership with cLabs will be exceptionally valuable. The cooperation will help further support our mission to contribute to the public and political discourse on a digital euro.
The European Central Bank (ECB) recently announced that it will start an investigative phase of the digital euro project in Q4 2021. While this was not a big surprise to many who closely follow the worldwide discussions about CBDCs and digital money, the ECB released a very interesting report on experiments that were conducted over the past 9 months. This report and its results caught many by surprise. It shows that the ECB has already tested different technologies as the core infrastructure for a potential digital euro and investigates how to mimic cash-like privacy and offline payments in a digital world. This article provides a brief overview about the background of why the ECB looks into the digitization of physical cash, which experiments it has already conducted, and which results these experiments produced.
What did the ECB announce?
On July 14, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the launch of a digital euro project, a project that will determine whether a central bank digital currency (CBDC) will be introduced in the euro area. The project will start with an investigation phase taking from Q4 2021 to Q4 2023.