Panel 3, chaired by Professor Seraina Grünewald, took on the balancing act between innovation and oversight: how much and what kind of regulation digital legal tender requires, whether regulation necessarily trades off against innovation, and what footprint central banks should have in the ecosystem of digital money and payments. Dr Yuri Biondi opened by setting the systemic scene, reading money as an infrastructure built on the central bank, the banking system and the interbank dimension — and warning, with Keynes, that liquidity does not exist for the system as a whole: tokenisation, far from a neutral upgrade, risks putting securitisation and money-market making on steroids. Professor Andreas Bielig examined the digital euro from the economic side, asking what an additional form of central bank money would actually bring to a landscape already served by reserves and cash — and revising his own published timeline for its arrival markedly towards the horizon.

Professor Reyes Palá Laguna connected the regulatory framework — MiCA, the Payment Services Directives and the digital euro proposal — to a very concrete lesson: the Iberian blackout of April 2025, when millions of citizens equipped with every conceivable digital wallet found themselves unable to buy food or water for lack of cash. Her conclusion: supervision, not technology, is the key — quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Professor Christos Hadjiemmanuil closed by reframing regulation as an instrument of strategic autonomy, identifying two challenges for the euro area: the double network leverage of American big tech, and dollar-based stablecoins as a vector of extraterritorial power — while pointing to Europe's instant payments regulation as the quiet, concrete step towards an integrated European payment system. Professor Bart Joosen was regrettably unable to attend.