Digital Euro Decision Coming In Months, Admits ECB President Lagarde

Commenting during an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Francine Lacqua, ECB President Christine Lagarde admitted that a decision on whether or not to roll out a Digital Euro is coming rather quickly, probably before the midpoint of 2021.

Christine Lagarde, who isn’t really Bitcoin’s biggest fan, with this admits that the EC realizes they are far behind that other major economic behemoth, China, in developing their own digital currency and need to speed things up.

China will be presenting it’s own Digital Yuan to the world during the next Winter Olympics, planned for 2022 in the capital Beijing.

Mid-2021

CBDC or Central Bank Digital Currencies are the state equivalent to cryptocurrencies of course. Both the US and the European Union are looking into it, with the EU admitting that by Mid 2021 a decision on whether or not to take things forward will be made.

Lagarde claimed during the Bloomberg interview:

But the whole process—let’s be realistic about it—will in my view take another four years. Maybe a little more, but I would hope that we could keep it within four years because it’s a technical endeavor as well as a fundamental change.

We need to make sure that we do it right. We owe it to the Europeans. They need to feel safe and secure. They need to feel that they are holding a central bank-backed digital bank note.

With that, the European Central Bank seems to at least moving ahead of the US Federal Reserve. Just last month, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell claimed that they were not in the mode of making a decision at this point.

Lagarde is not a fan of Bitcoin and is quite outspoken about this. During an interview on French TV in February, she stated that:

Bitcoin is not a currency. Cryptoassets are not a currency. It is a class of highly speculative assets.