Digital Euro Podcast

How do current forms of money differ from cryptocurrencies?

Participants of the episode

Tony McLaughlin, Emerging Payments and Business Development, Treasury and Trade Solutions (Citi)

Which use cases do CBDCs have?

Participants:

What is the goal and focus of ABI's digital euro initiative? What makes Spunta different from other projects in this field? How do these different approaches differ? Which design paradigms for a digital euro is ABI advocating? Which role should the private sector for the digital euro play?

Panelists:

What is the potential of CBDCs in improving today’s cross-border payment systems?

Panelists:

Which different stablecoins exist? What are the different ways of ensuring the stability of stablecoins?

Participants of the Podcast:

Dr. Markus Franke, Partner, cLabs

Jón Helgi Egilsson, Co-founder and Chair, Monerium

Julien Le Goc, Vice President Enterprise Risk Management, Circle

Jonas Gross, Co-founder and Chairman, Digital Euro Association (DEA)

The publication of the first Libra white paper in June 2019 was a wake-up call for central banks around the world. Many of them started to intensify their efforts regarding the issuance of an own central bank digital currency (CBDC). According to a study conducted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), 80% of central banks worldwide are currently working on a CBDC. First projects have been launched, such as the Sand Dollar in the Bahamas. Others, such as China, are actively testing their CBDC called DC/EP. The European Central Bank (ECB) is also looking into the possibility of introducing a CBDC for the Euro Area, the digital euro. Therefore, a digital euro might become reality in a few years.

In the fourth and final episode of the four-part series on the digital Euro, Alexander Bechtel and Manuel Klein address the crucial question of why the euro should be digitized and which institution will ultimately provide it. After a detailed analysis of the existing money system in the first episode, as well as a description of the digital euro issued by the public and private sector in the second and third episode, the last episode provides an outlook into the future and presents concrete use cases of the different forms of the digital Euro. The goal of the episode is to understand which benefits a Digital Euro will bring, which institutions will provide it for which purposes, and when we will see the Digital Euro.

In the third episode of the four-part series on the digital Euro, Alexander Bechtel and Manuel Klein discuss the different forms of a private sector digital euro. The central question of this episode is whether the private sector will continue to generate and provide the bulk of the money supply in the future - just as commercial banks already do today. At the latest since the strong media attention around the joint project Diem (formerly Libra) launched by Facebook, so-called "stablecoins" issued by private companies which represent the USD or EUR on a blockchain are all over the news. But what exactly are these stablecoins? What forms do they take and which of them would be suitable to be used as a scaleable euro-denominated means of payment in the real economy?

In the second episode of the four-part series on the digital Euro, Alexander Bechtel and Manuel Klein discuss the different forms of a public sector digital euro - better known as Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Many people think of a CBDC first and foremost when they think of a digital euro, not least because the ECB also uses this vocabulary in its communication on a CBDC. This is reason enough to take a closer look at this type of the digital euro.

In a four-part podcast series, Alexander Bechtel and Manuel Klein explain how the euro can be "digitized", which different forms the digital euro can take, and what hurdles must be overcome to make the digital euro a reality. Terms such as fiat money, central bank reserves, (synthetic) CBDC, stablecoins, the e-money token as well as tokenized commercial bank money will be defined and differentiated from each other. Look forward to four exciting episodes about the money system of the future. We help you to be able to participate in in-depth-discussions on the exciting topic of digital money.