Fabio Panetta, an European Central Bank board member, affirms the ECB's privacy policy for the digital euro and claims that while it may have an app, the digital currency will never be programmable.
According Panetta, if the digital euro is implemented, it will protect the function of the central bank by providing more payment choices than only currency. He made this statement to a committee of the European Parliament on January 23.
Panetta was pleased with the development of the investigation on a future digital euro. He stated to the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee of the European Parliament:
“The ECB is at the global forefront of the efforts by central banks to design state-of-the-art digital payment solutions for both retail and wholesale transactions.”
According to Panetta, access to the digital euro would first be available to individuals, enterprises, and governments within the euro zone, after which it would be opened up to those in the European Economic Area and lastly to "chosen third-party nations."
According to Panetta, it would be ideal to implement a plan that established universal norms, standards, and processes to enable the creation of supplementary goods and services based on it. The digital euro should allow for free transactions, with optional supplementary services from middlemen.
🧵 Our priority for the digital euro project has always been clear: to preserve the role of public money in retail payments by making it available in digital form, alongside cash, says Executive Board member Fabio Panetta.
— European Central Bank (@ecb) January 23, 2023
Read the full speech https://t.co/6UWtNKsqKX
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In the third quarter of this year, research will go from the investigative to the realization stage, according to Panetta. In order to remind the lawmakers of their contribution to the digital euro initiative, he concluded.
“It has a clear political dimension in view of its broad societal implications.”
