Mass Banking Outage Sparks Doubts on EU’s Planned Digital Euro: Report

Vocal opposition to the European Central Bank’s (ECB) digital euro project reportedly swelled after the institution’s payment system crashed last month.

TARGET2 (T2), the ECB’s real-time gross settlement system, went down in late February, which prevented payments from being processed for several hours.

Now, some members of the European Parliament, a legislative body of the European Union (EU), are pointing to the crash as potential evidence that the ECB isn’t ready to launch a digital euro, per a new report from Reuters.

German MP Markus Ferber, a member of the European People’s Party, says the outage was “a blow to the ECB’s credibility.”

“People will ask legitimate questions how the ECB will be able to run a digital euro when they cannot even keep their day-to-day operations running smoothly.”

The European Union’s central bank has been pushing for a digital euro to counter US President Donald Trump’s embrace of dollar-pegged private sector stablecoins.

ECB board member Piero Cipollone said at a conference in January that Trump’s new executive order on crypto could drive people away from banks.

“I guess the key word here (in Trump’s executive order) is worldwide. This solution, you all know, further disintermediates banks as they lose fees, they lose clients… That’s why we need a digital euro.”

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