Bundesbank President Nagel backs euro retail CBDC and euro-pegged stablecoins

Deutsche Bundesbank president Joachim Nagel used a business reception in Frankfurt to call for a stronger push on euro digital-money instruments, urging European policymakers to build both a retail central-bank digital currency and to enable regulated euro-pegged stablecoins. He described a two-track approach: a wholesale CBDC that would sit on central-bank rails and support programmable settlement between banks and market infrastructures, and retail-facing tokens — whether public or privately issued under a strict regulatory perimeter — to serve consumers and small businesses.

Nagel framed the debate in strategic terms, warning that rapid adoption of dollar-linked tokens could erode euro-area payments autonomy and complicate monetary sovereignty. He pointed to concrete policy dynamics in the United States — where a federal stablecoin framework includes implementation timing measures (an 18-month window after signing or 120 days after final rules) — as a spur for Europe to accelerate its own arrangements before foreign tokens gain market dominance.

His remarks come amid converging signals from other European quarters. An ECB board member has recently cast a retail CBDC as an instrument of strategic autonomy, pressing for interoperability, merchant acceptance and an open standard for retail payments across the bloc, rather than limiting the design to niche offline use. At the same time, a consortium of established banks including BBVA is moving toward a bank-backed, euro-denominated stablecoin, seeking authorization under EU digital-asset rules in the Netherlands and targeting market launch in the second half of 2026.

Those parallel developments create immediate coordination challenges for technical standards, custody arrangements, AML/CFT compliance and on-chain governance. Nagel emphasised that a wholesale ledger must deliver programmable central-bank money for institutions without undermining central-bank control, while private tokens will require resilient reserve and custody models to win public trust.

From a market perspective, bank-led stablecoin initiatives could offer regulated custody and familiar oversight that appeal to corporates and merchants, but they must resolve questions about liquidity provisioning, reserve management and interoperability with legacy banking systems to achieve meaningful adoption. Regulators will need to weigh financial-stability safeguards — including limits on run risk and contagion — against efficiency gains and cheaper cross-border transfers that tokenisation promises.

Operational hurdles extend to merchant onboarding, point-of-sale integration, liability allocation, and privacy protections if a digital euro or token becomes widely accepted as means of payment. If European authorities and industry synchronize standards and regulatory expectations, euro-based digital instruments could crowd in domestic providers and reshape the retail payments landscape. If not, the region risks fragmentation or dependence on non-euro tokens.

Nagel’s intervention adds political weight to technical design choices now being debated across EU institutions, national central banks and private-sector consortia. It underlines a policy window in which timelines, interoperability APIs and custody rules will determine whether euro-denominated solutions can match or pre-empt US-backed token adoption. For banks, fintechs and policymakers, the near-term focus is on translating these strategic ambitions into concrete authorisations, secure architectures and clear commercial propositions.