EU Eyes Ethereum Or Solana For Accelerated Digital Euro Rollout: Report

Europe's digital currency ambitions just got a blockchain boost—and it's looking at two heavyweights to power the revolution.

The Race for Digital Sovereignty

Brussels isn't just watching from the sidelines anymore. Insider reports confirm the EU is actively evaluating Ethereum and Solana as potential infrastructure partners for its digital euro project. This isn't about experimentation—it's about acceleration.

Why These Blockchains?

Ethereum brings established security and decentralization—proven through years of battle-testing. Solana counters with blistering transaction speeds and lower costs. Both offer something traditional banking infrastructure can't match: native programmability for future financial innovations.

The Implication Play

Choosing either blockchain would signal Europe's commitment to leveraging existing crypto infrastructure rather than building from scratch. It bypasses bureaucratic delays and taps into already-vibrant developer ecosystems. Suddenly, the digital euro isn't just another CBDC—it's potentially interoperable with DeFi, smart contracts, and global crypto markets from day one.

Of course, watching central bankers try to embrace decentralization while maintaining control will be quite the spectacle—almost as entertaining as watching them explain volatile gas fees to parliament.

One thing's clear: the EU isn't just dipping toes anymore. It's preparing to dive headfirst into the crypto deep end.

Why The EU Suddenly Eyes Ethereum And Solana

The pivot under discussion marks a departure from years of ECB signaling that emphasized a tightly controlled, privacy-preserving infrastructure run by the Eurosystem and intermediated by banks and payment providers.

The immediate catalyst, European officials concede in private, is competitive pressure: a maturing, US-led stablecoin regime and the network effects of dollar tokens in commerce and markets. Public-chain issuance—if chosen—would aim to maximize reach and composability in the existing crypto economy, albeit while confronting the policy trade-offs that come with transparency on permissionless ledgers.

ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone has repeatedly framed the digital euro as a strategic response to foreign dependence in payments. In a Paris speech this spring he argued that a central bank instrument WOULD “reduce our reliance on foreign providers” and warned that widespread use of dollar stablecoins could erode European banks’ “fees, data and deposits.”

Formally, the ECB describes the digital euro as a “digital equivalent of cash,” free for basic use, privacy-protecting, and universally accepted across the euro area—objectives that are technology-agnostic but stringent in implementation. Whether those goals can be met on a public network will hinge on design specifics: wallet and identity models, on-chain privacy (potentially via cryptographic techniques), settlement finality, and how the two-tier distribution with supervised intermediaries is preserved on open infrastructure. The central bank has not committed to a platform and continues to test multiple architectures.

Public blockchains promise instant integration with the global crypto stack—programmable payments, tokenized deposits, and DeFi-adjacent rails—along with DEEP liquidity and tooling. But they also surface policy challenges that a private ledger can more readily mitigate: transaction traceability versus user privacy, exposure to network-level congestion or outages, and governance externalities (e.g., protocol upgrades, validator incentives, and MEV) that a sovereign might prefer to control.

EU officials, according to the FT, are working through those trade-offs with a view to preventing the euro from ceding further ground to dollar tokens while maintaining European standards on data protection and financial stability. No final decision has been taken.

The debate over “public versus private” should not obscure a definitional point: the digital euro remains a central bank liability—unlike commercial stablecoins backed by reserves—and would be issued within a legal framework set by EU institutions.

In that sense, the current deliberations are about the rail rather than the nature of the instrument. Still, the rail matters. Choosing Ethereum or solana would effectively place a euro CBDC alongside the world’s dominant token ecosystems, with all the distribution advantages and regulatory questions that entails.

For Ethereum or Solana, an EU selection would be a powerful catalyst—and a clear signal that public blockchains have reached institutional-grade maturity.

At press time, ETH traded at $4,316.