The same question can have both a strategic answer and a practical one. That’s something EU lawmakers are finding out in real time, after the European Parliament’s ECON Committee approved a plan by the European Central Bank to launch a digital euro by 2029.
For Europe, the strategic question is no longer whether blockchain-based finance will coexist with traditional banking, but which forms of digital money solve which institutional problems. The practical question is whether sovereignty, deposit retention, cross-border settlement, securities tokenization and machine-to-machine commerce can coexist in a landscape that’s being built on the fly by banks, regulators and infrastructure providers all hoping to avoid creating the same financial silos that defined the payment ecosystem of yesteryear.
“The current way that money movement is being done is being totally rearchitected,” Taurus Co-Founder and Managing Partner Lamine Brahimi told PYMNTS.
“Most credit card payments in the Eurozone are held through American credit card schemes. And for me, the digital euro is a way to provide an alternative,” he said.
The result is not a single future of money. It is a sorting process.
The Digital Euro Is Not Trying to Do Everything
The digital money debate is often described as a contest among central bank digital currencies, tokenized deposits and stablecoins. Brahimi sees something more specific: a market beginning to separate into distinct layers, each solving a different problem for a different constituency.
“Those are very different animals,” he said, describing the digital euro, tokenized bank deposits and stablecoins, noting that “the digital euro is not necessarily blockchain based.”
That distinction matters because the next phase of digital money may not be won by a single format. It may instead be defined by how sovereign money, commercial bank money and freely transferable on-chain money coexist.
More important, Lamini added, is the counterparty behind the digital euro. A consumer or business holding digital euros would not be holding a claim on a commercial bank, but a central bank.
“You or me, as a holder of digital euro, we will have technically the counterparty risk of the central bank, which is by definition zero,” he said.
That logic makes the digital euro most relevant for retail payments and small-business use cases. It also makes the digital euro fundamentally different from a tokenized deposit, and also helps explain why Europe’s public-sector project is advancing even as banks build alternatives of their own. A digital euro, in the form being debated, may not solve every institutional need.
Money Movement Is Being Rebuilt, Not Copied
The digital euro may dominate the policy debate abroad, but it is only one layer in a broader rebuild. Banks are developing tokenized deposits to keep commercial bank money relevant in digital markets, while stablecoins are becoming a settlement tool for open, always-on commerce.
Tokenized securities, Brahimi added, are meanwhile searching for an on-chain cash leg in order to scale.
He said tokenizing a security is only half the problem. If the security sits on-chain but the cash leg remains stuck in legacy settlement infrastructure, the efficiency gain is limited. Without that institutional rewiring, tokenized listed equities risk remaining a technical experiment rather than a market-structure shift. The improvement must be material: 24/7 trading, lower costs or a meaningfully better settlement model. Otherwise, tokenization adds a new wrapper without changing the underlying economics.
Of course, the next user of digital money may not be a person at all. As AI agents begin acting on behalf of companies, customers and institutions, they will need ways to verify actions, establish trust and exchange value. Brahimi does not see artificial intelligence as a threat to digital asset infrastructure. He sees it as a reason that infrastructure becomes more relevant.
“Distributed ledgers [can be] a strong support to AI activity, just to create basic trust between your agent and my agent,” he said.
That trust layer matters because AI agents trained by different firms, jurisdictions or systems may not naturally trust one another. A shared ledger can provide a record of what occurred. Once agents can verify activity, payment becomes the next step. Brahimi said he expects “machines talking to machines and also exchanging value.”
That gives stablecoins a different role from tokenized deposits. Tokenized deposits may serve banks and their institutional clients. Stablecoins may become more useful in open, programmable environments where counterparties, platforms and agents need money that can move across networks.
The Post-Quantum Problem Is Already on the Roadmap
There is another infrastructure issue that cuts across all forms of digital money: post-quantum security. Brahimi warned that the cryptographic foundations of digital asset systems will need to evolve as quantum computing advances.
“All the signatures, like the core of the nuclear plant, how the cryptography is done, needs to be retooled,” he said.
That migration will not be theoretical. It could require institutions and investors to move assets from legacy addresses to new post-quantum-secure addresses. For banks, asset managers and infrastructure providers, the implication is clear: digital asset readiness is not only about regulatory permissions or product launches. It is about whether the security architecture can survive the next computing era.
“Anyone who is serious about digital assets [needs] to look at that actually already now,” Brahimi said.
After all, the real question is not whether the digital euro, tokenized deposits or stablecoins win. It is which institutions can control, and are able to secure, which emerging layer of the new money stack.
Watch the full PYMNTS TV interview with Taurus Co-Founder Lamine Brahimi to hear more about:
- Why the digital euro, tokenized deposits and stablecoins are solving different problems.Brahimi says the digital euro is primarily a sovereignty and retail-payments play, while tokenized deposits protect commercial bank deposits and stablecoins serve open, transferable on-chain settlement.
- How tokenized deposits are becoming banks’ answer to deposit flight and 24/7 money movement.The discussion explores why banks are building tokenized deposits to defend against stablecoin competition while enabling instant cross-border settlement from New York to Singapore to Dubai without traditional cutoff times.
- Why AI agents and post-quantum security could define the next phase of digital money.Brahimi argues that distributed ledgers can create trust between AI agents as machines begin exchanging value, while warning that digital asset infrastructure must prepare now for a post-quantum cryptographic reset.