European Central Bank Bashes Bitcoin And Cryptocurrency

As the European Central Bank (ECB) is intensifying its efforts to roll out a digital euro, Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, is also mounting attacks on bitcoin (BTC), among other cryptoassets and stablecoins.

In her article, published today in the L’ENA hors les murs magazine, the president of the bank which serves 19 member states of the European Union that use the euro, said that “central bank money in digital form is still not available for retail payments,” but the ECB’s Governing Council has been exploring the possibility of issuing a new central bank digital currency (CBDC), a digital euro, in an attempt to respond to the accelerating trend toward digitization in payments.

“A digital euro would complement cash and ensure that consumers continue to have unrestricted access to central bank money in a form that meets their evolving digital payment needs,” Lagarde said, adding that “a properly designed digital euro would create synergies with the payments industry and enable the private sector to build new businesses based on digital euro-related services.”

However, she contrasted the designed CBDC with bitcoin and other cryptoassets which Lagarde views as risky to their users, all the while conceding that they have generated new opportunities.

“The main risk lies in relying purely on technology and the flawed concept of there being no identifiable issuer or claim. This also means that users cannot rely on crypto-assets maintaining a stable value: they are highly volatile, illiquid and speculative, and so do not fulfill all the functions of money,” according to Lagarde.

However, while the President claims that these assets are illiquid, the 24-hour BTC trading volume surpassed USD 20bn today, ethereum (EHT), the second-largest cryptoasset, also surpassed this threshold today.

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