The conference opened in the Aula Magna with institutional greetings that placed BIC25 in the city that invented much of modern finance. Professor Alessandra Petrucci, Rector of the University of Florence, recalled how the Medici transformed banking while supporting artistic innovation, and how the merchant Francesco Datini devised the bill of exchange nearby in Prato — a genius of place, she suggested, that now brings scholars back to Florence to examine another turning point in the history of money, one in which technological progress must not lose sight of human values. Dr Enrico Leone, Chancellor of the European Banking Institute, introduced EBI's academic project ten years on — 36 academic members across 23 European countries, over 180 working papers, a network of supervisors and central banks — and set the panellists a concrete task: to consider whether the digital euro can counter the growing dominance of dollar-backed stablecoins, how the intermediary role of banks is to be preserved, and how the digital euro is to be distinguished from existing electronic payment methods. Professor Maria Elvira Mancino, Head of the Department of Economics and Management, joined from Barcelona to welcome participants on behalf of the department.

Professor Filippo Zatti, conference chair, then set out the intellectual programme of the three days. Retracing the regulatory landscape — MiCA in force since 2023, the digital euro and legal tender proposals still awaiting first reading, the US GENIUS Act reshaping the American approach to stablecoins — he argued that the question is no longer digitalisation itself but the very origin of money and its conceptual confusion with the means of payment. Money, he suggested, carries constitutional requirements: it transmits not only economic but also constitutional freedoms, and the monopoly of public money is not a privilege but a guarantee for everyone. The conference title itself was a deliberate choice: forging rather than minting, because the greatest challenge is to tell the authentic from the counterfeit — which is, in the end, the problem of trust that blockchain technology and the law both try to solve.