The French and European Crypto Industry: the New Digital Currency Developers

For over a decade, blockchain and crypto-asset technologies have been at the epicenter of a global paradigm shift. By giving back to users the ownership and control of their assets, their data, and the value they create in the virtual world, and by allowing them to do what they want with them, within a few years “crypto” has propelled us to the new Web3 framework whose first building block, bitcoin, immediately set the stage for new, natively digital means of exchange.

In this article, we will portray the French and European crypto-asset industry, with its private and public stakeholders, as well as the studies that have already been conducted in order to apprehend and master this innovation. We will show that, although France and Europe embarked on the regulatory process around these new digital currencies very early on, much remains to be done so as to remove the obstacles to their development. We will then explain the three forms of digital currencies – cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies – which are each part of the profound transformation that is taking place in the worldwide economy and finance.