Europe’s monetary architecture is being actively redefined: central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), local currency denominated stablecoins and tokenized deposits have been added to the mix of public and private money in Europe’s digital financial system. This session brings together central banks and industry leaders to assess the emerging landscape of digital currencies in Europe and to confront the key design trade-offs around privacy, interoperability, and distribution. From the role of intermediaries to the risk of fragmentation across competing forms of digital money, the discussion will explore how Europe can balance innovation, sovereignty, and financial stability in its future financial infrastructure.

The stock market is going on-chain. The NYSE-DTCC Russell 1000 pilot, the explosion of tokenized Treasuries past $11 billion, and a generation of on-chain private credit platforms are no longer proofs of concept - they are live infrastructure. The question has shifted from whether capital markets can tokenize to how fast the supporting stack - prime brokerage, custody, clearing, compliance, and investor access - can be rebuilt for on-chain settlement.

This roundtable convenes the architects of Digital Capital Markets to map where the infrastructure is genuinely ready, where legacy systems are the bottleneck, and what it will take to move emergent infrastructure from pilots to the primary issuance venue of choice. Participants will examine the impact of specific on-chain mechanics on the next generation stock market, including:

1. how T+0 atomic settlement changes margin and liquidity requirements
2. what fractionalisation does to price discovery and secondary market depth, and
3. whether the current generation of permissioned chain architectures can deliver the throughput and finality guarantees that institutional issuers actually require.

The session will also address the regulatory frontier - jurisdictional recognition of on-chain ownership, the status of tokenized securities under existing market structure rules, and where the gaps between MiCA, the GENIUS Act, and emerging APAC frameworks create opportunities for either arbitrage or paralysis.

In recent years, the function of popular cryptocurrencies has shifted. While originally designed as payment instruments, they are nowadays more frequently used as highly volatile investment objects by a variety of investors including retail investors. While a BIS Working Paper showed that between 2015 and 2022 an estimated 73-81% of retail investors have likely lost money on their initial investment in Bitcoin, recent reviews by IOSCO and FSB found that investor protection is still underdeveloped in this area.

This raises the question how and to what extent investors, especially retail investors, must be protected. Starting with a discussion on the available data, the panellists will discuss gaps in current regulation and concepts for an appropriate cryptocurrency regulation architecture in the area of (retail) investor protection.