We've been talking about smart contracts for a decade
Marius Hanganu| Programmable money | Conditional payments | |
|---|---|---|
| What it means | The money itself carries rules on how it can be used. | A payment executes automatically when a condition is met. |
| Digital euro | Never, says the ECB. | Yes, it could facilitate them. |
| Example | — | Pay on delivery for an online purchase. |
We’ve been talking about smart contracts for a decade — but money still hasn’t joined the conversation.
The banks have not been idle. Some of the largest took smart contracts well past the whitepaper:
- UBS has run blockchain pilots where payments settle the moment conditions are met. Its UBS Digital Cash pilot, announced in November 2024, used smart contracts that “automatically execute payments as soon as predefined conditions are met”. It covered dollars, Swiss francs, euros and yuan.
- HSBC, Citi, ING, BNP Paribas helped build the Contour network, turning trade-finance paperwork into near-instant digital flows. The letter-of-credit network launched in 2020, backed by global trade banks, with Citi joining as an investor. At 60 to 70 transactions a month, it announced its shutdown in 2023, was relaunched by Xalts in 2024 and acquired by XDC Ventures in October 2025.
- DZ Bank has been experimenting with “Smart Bond Contracts” to automate everything from issuance to redemption. Its May 2025 white paper maps a bond “along the entire value chain” on a distributed ledger. It proposes a standard digital protocol for the wholesale bond market, replacing manual processes.
Where the pilots stop
All brilliant use cases — yet each one hits the same wall: today’s euros can’t execute logic.
All brilliant use cases — yet each one hits the same wall: today’s euros can’t execute logic.
The logic lives on a ledger. The euro doesn’t. UBS Digital Cash, for example, is a solution for UBS’s own clients, running on UBS’s own network. Its reach ends where UBS’s does.
The Digital Euro could finally fix that.
The timeline is now concrete. The Eurosystem closed the preparation phase in October 2025. The ECB plans a pilot for the second half of 2027. It aims to be ready for a potential first issuance in 2029, if the EU regulation is adopted by the end of 2026.
With a programmable, ECB-backed settlement layer, smart contracts wouldn’t just simulate automation — they’d become it. Imagine conditional payments that trigger automatically, bonds that pay coupons themselves, or supply-chain deals that close the moment goods are verified.
The ECB’s FAQ is precise on this point: the digital euro “would never be programmable money, but it could facilitate conditional payments”. Its example is an online purchase paid only once delivery is confirmed.
The Digital Euro isn’t just new money. It’s the missing link between code and value.
A shorter version of this piece first appeared on LinkedIn.
Marius Hanganu
Software engineer and co-founder of Tremend. He writes about AI agents, management in the age of AI and the digital euro.
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