The European Parliament has given the green light to continue negotiations on introducing the digital euro - a stable digital currency with which the European Central Bank wants to strengthen Europe's monetary sovereignty and offer citizens a safe alternative for payments. It sounds technical, but behind it lies a big geopolitical game.

Why does Europe need a digital euro at all? Because today almost every digital payment in Europe passes through American systems - Visa, Mastercard, Google Pay, Apple Pay. That means dependence on infrastructure that isn't its own. As one expert puts it, when all transactions run through someone else's systems, the ECB has limited control over its own currency. The digital euro is an attempt to change that.

Unlike cryptocurrencies, whose value jumps and drops, the digital euro would have a guaranteed value - one digital euro would be worth exactly as much as a physical one. And here comes the most delicate question: privacy. Citizens rightly fear surveillance, but the ECB promises payments directly from phone to phone, with anonymity similar to cash. Whether it will really be so remains to be seen, because promises of privacy are easy, and keeping them is hard.

There are safeguards too. The ECB proposes that citizens be able to hold at most 3,000 euros in digital form, with the surplus automatically going to a bank account - so as not to trigger a mass withdrawal of money from banks in a crisis. The timeline is clear: a legal framework in 2026, a pilot project in 2027, full rollout by 2029. For Macedonia, which dreams of the euro anyway, this is a story worth following - because tomorrow's euro may live not only in your pocket, but in your phone.