Fernando Navarrete, the Member of the European Parliament who coordinates the digital euro legislation, has published a non paper on scaling tokenization across Europe. His instincts lean firmly toward capital markets liberalization, and it shows. The paper is less about new regulation than about removing the barriers that stop existing initiatives from reaching production scale.
The paper diagnoses what Navarrete calls the “Strategic European Paradox.” Despite being first to regulate with MiCA and the DLT Pilot Regime, the EU is not first to scale. Switzerland, the UK, Singapore and the United States are all moving tokenized markets into production, and the MEP warns that delay carries a lasting cost. Liquidity tends to settle in one place and stay there, so losing ground now means losing it for good.
Europe does not lack building blocks. The ECB’s Pontes initiative went live in September for central bank money settlement, the DLT Pilot Regime created a legal sandbox, and private sector stablecoin initiatives such as Qivalis are progressing. What is missing, Navarrete argues, is coordinated political impetus tying these together. The efforts sit in separate institutional silos with no shared blueprint.
To fix that, he proposes a High-Level Digital Markets Task Force, borrowing from the UK’s playbook of appointing a Wholesale Digital Markets Champion. The task force would unite the European Commission, the Eurogroup, the ECB and the European Supervisory Authorities under a single accountable owner.
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