The US Congress has just passed three crypto bills in quick succession. They called it “Crypto Week.” Europe has been working on its crypto rules for years. The difference in approach says everything about how these two powers see the future of money. The American bills almost failed. Some Republicans blocked them, worried about government surveillance. They only agreed to vote yes after getting promises that surveillance protections would be added to other bills later and so three separate bills emerged. One covers stablecoins. Another tries to sort out which agencies regulate what. The third bans the Federal Reserve from creating a digital dollar. There is no master plan connecting them. Each bill addresses someone’s specific worry.
The stablecoin bill is bold and audacious. While it requires reserves, it lets many corporations issue their own digital money once they get proper licensing. Think about that - Walmart coins, Target tokens, though with some restrictions for big tech companies. It resembles the American Free Banking Era of 1800, when banks printed their own money, and we all know how this ended. People lost their savings when banks failed. American politicians really believe government digital money would end personal freedom. One congressman called it “a direct threat to the American way of life.” These same people share every purchase with Google and Amazon, every glimpse of existence with X or Facebook. But somehow that is different.
Europe went the other way and spent years building MiCA, the so-called crypto framework. Every detail painstakingly planned. Every scenario considered. The problem? Europe already had payment rules called PSD2, and now these overlap with the crypto rules in confusing ways. The European Banking Authority admitted this is a mess and told regulators to go easy on enforcement for now. The confusion is real. Compliance teams across Europe are struggling to understand which rules apply when. Every interpretation seems to conflict with another. Clarity was promised. Complexity arrived.
The real split, however, between the EU and USA is philosophical. Americans think government money means surveillance and control. Europeans think it means progress and efficiency. The European Central Bank (ECB) is building a digital euro right now. ECB talks about it like it is just a technical upgrade. But it would record and make every transaction available in real time. Every coffee. Every purchase. Everything.
Technology marches on while regulations and philosophies diverge. Crypto companies showed the Securities Exchange Commission something called ERC-3643. It is a way to put stocks or real estate on the blockchain while still following rules. Technology itself checks if you are allowed to buy or sell. No paperwork. No delays. Some European institutions have begun experimenting with such compliance technologies. America just keeps listening and nodding without deciding. This costs real money. We could make transferring assets as easy as email, but we are stuck arguing about which existing law or statute applies.
Both systems espouse novelty albeit showing holes. The US bills at face value lack focus on consumer protection. No environmental requirements. Few details about what happens when things fail. Most of the tough decisions got pushed to regulators who do not know what they are doing and are equally uncertain. Europe, however, has the opposite problem. Too many rules that conflict with each other. A simple payment might trigger three different regulations. This does not make things safer but more prone to error.
Neither system handles DeFi well. These are programs that run themselves without any company behind them. Both America and Europe wave their hands and promise to figure it out later. They will not. You cannot regulate something that has no owner, no address, no one to sue which is purely decentralised in the conventional way. The bigger issue is that crypto, digital assets, are global, but regulation is local. Technology does not care about borders. But every country wants to control what happens in their territory. So crypto companies build elaborate systems to block certain features in certain places. The compliance infrastructure is becoming more complex than the actual products.
While we are debating the two systems and whilst politicians and regulators fight over control, the irony unfolds, technology keeps evolving. Every day it gets harder to put back in the box. Every day the old categories make less sense. Every day we get closer to a financial system that nobody fully understands or controls. Somewhere someone is building the thing that will break everything. Innovation runs ahead. Law tries to catch up. By the time it does, something new has already started. The cycle continues.
Fasten your seatbelts and let’s see how these two different experiments play out. America chose speed and chaos. Europe chose planning and order. Neither is clearly better. Both reflect deep beliefs about how money should work and who should control it. Wait for the next crisis. Some stablecoin will collapse. Some protocol will get hacked. Then we will see which system works.
Article by Dr Ian Gauci
This article was first published in The Times of Malta of the 27 July 2025.
Photo credits: Times of Malta