With other countries seriously considering this direction, the EU has finally start its Digital Euro (CBDC) project. It will take them 2 years to explore the potential of such a currency, and if they decide to actually apply it, they say it would take them at least 5 years to officially launch it. As an EU resident, I am not particularly excited about this, because I know that it will take them much more than 5 years to do anything, and all that time will come in handy for Bitcoin to become more mainstream in EU.
What interests me more is whether the EU will at some point start making some bad moves when it comes to Bitcoin or stablecoins, which they obviously consider competition (although they don't explicitly mention Bitcoin). Of course, this reasoning stems from the assumption that China decided to conduct a final battle with Bitcoin precisely because of its CBDC, which is already being tested on a large sample of people.
Today the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) decided to proceed with a 24-month central bank digital currency (CBDC) project to investigate the potential of a digital euro. Even if it decides to go ahead with a digital euro, the ECB President has previously stated it would take five years to launch.
While no decision has yet been made whether to issue a digital currency, the ECB and European national central banks have outlined several motivations over the last year or more. The first, as Lagarde stated, is to ensure that as cash usage declines, there is still central bank money but in a digital form. Without a CBDC, there’s a risk that private digital currencies, including stablecoins, will dominate, and they still might. Such a scenario would make it harder for the central bank to control monetary policy, maintain financial stability, ensure low cost payments and enable financial inclusion.