EU cryptocurrency regulator plans to use digital euro for cross-border transactions

The President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, has spoken about the European Union’s plans to use the digital euro for cross-border transactions — CBDC will facilitate payments between the US, the EU and other countries, according to Lagarde.

According to Christine Lagarde, amid the widespread use of digital payments and the reduction in the use of cash, EU residents may be interested in the European Central Bank’s digital currency. However, cross-border transactions with the European CBDC require concerted action to make the state digital currency safe and accessible.

The President of the European Central Bank assured that the work on the development and improvement of the state digital currency continues, but it is already clear that the range of users will be limited at first. «The central bank guarantees that these payments will not be used for commercial purposes,» Christine Lagarde emphasized.

Lagarde also noted that there are concerns among users about the privacy of the digital euro, but there is no need to worry about this: if the Central Bank chooses CBDC, the protection of user information will be guaranteed. «The ECB will not use the digital euro to collect private data,» Lagarde assured.

It is because of the possible expansion of state control over the last areas of personal economic life free from supervision that analysts of the American research center Bitcoin Policy called on the US authorities to abandon the development of a state cryptocurrency. «CBDCs will essentially give governments access to every transaction made by any person anywhere in the world. It’s only a matter of time before transaction data is available to everyone in the world, as government IT infrastructure is a target of increasingly frequent hacker attacks,» shared their point of view Natalie Smolenski, Executive Director of the Texas Bitcoin Foundation, and Dan Held, former Head of Development at Kraken.