EU Parliament's Digital Euro Lead Calls for Political Push to Scale Tokenisation

Fernando Navarrete, the Member of the European Parliament coordinating digital euro legislation, has circulated a non-paper arguing that Europe’s tokenisation ambitions are stalling not for want of rules but for want of coordinated political will. His diagnosis centres on what he labels the “Strategic European Paradox”: the EU was first to regulate through the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework and the DLT Pilot Regime, yet Switzerland, the UK, Singapore, and the United States are all further along in moving tokenised markets into live production.

Navarrete’s concern is structural rather than technical. The European Central Bank‘s Pontes initiative went live in September for central bank money settlement, the DLT Pilot Regime provides a legal sandbox, and private stablecoin efforts such as Qivalis are advancing. What is absent, in his reading, is a unifying political blueprint that ties these components together rather than leaving them in separate institutional silos. His warning on liquidity is pointed: it tends to concentrate in one place and remain there, meaning ground lost now may not be recoverable.

His proposed remedy draws explicitly on the UK’s approach. He calls for a High-Level Digital Markets Task Force that would bring the European Commission, the Eurogroup, the ECB, and the European Supervisory Authorities under a single accountable owner, mirroring the UK model of appointing a Wholesale Digital Markets Champion. The paper is framed as a rallying document rather than a legislative proposal, making it commentary with potential to shape the political agenda rather than an operational commitment in itself.