Today in crypto, European Central Bank Executive Board member Piero Cipollone said private digital money cannot scale Europe’s tokenized markets on its own, Bitmine chairman Tom Lee has tipped an end to the “mini-crypto winter” impacting Ether, and Forrester said Stripe’s recently released Machine Payments Protocol could be a game-changer for automated AI transactions.
ECB says stablecoins, tokenized deposits need central bank money to scale
Tokenized deposits and stablecoins need tokenized central bank money as a public settlement anchor if Europe’s tokenized financial markets are to scale, Piero Cipollone, a member of the European Central Bank’s Executive Board, said on Monday.
Cipollone pointed to Pontes, the Eurosystem’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) settlement initiative, which is designed to connect market DLT platforms with the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services and provide settlement in central bank money.
“Without tokenised central bank money, a seller of a tokenised security may receive payment in an asset they are not comfortable holding – one exposed to price volatility or credit risk – which limits the market’s ability to scale,” Cipollone said in a speech at the House of the Euro in Brussels on Monday.
The ECB said Pontes is due for an initial launch in the third quarter of 2026, allowing market participants to settle DLT-based transactions in central bank money. The comments build on the ECB’s broader Appia initiative, published on March 11, which is intended to produce a blueprint for a future European tokenized financial ecosystem by 2028.
Bitmine chair sees “mini-crypto winter” thaw for Ether
Bitmine Immersion Technologies chairman Tom Lee has tipped an end to the “mini-crypto winter” impacting Ether, as the company bought another $139 million in ETH last week.
Lee said in a statement on Monday that Bitmine has maintained a higher buying pace over the last three weeks as it expects the end to a several-month-long Ether slump in its “base case.”
The crypto markets crashed in October last year, with Bitcoin falling from its all-time peak above $126,000 during the month, while Ether declined from its August high of $4,946. Analysts have been debating when the crypto markets will see a meaningful rebound.
Lee pointed to positive catalysts, such as the CLARITY Act advancing in Congress and crypto’s relative stability despite recent turmoil in Iran, as signs that winter is starting to thaw.
Lee’s statements came as Bitmine disclosed it had purchased an additional 65,341 Ether in the past week (worth $139 million), bringing total holdings to more than 4.6 million tokens.
Stripe protocol could mark turning point for micropayments, Forrester says
Stripe’s newly launched Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) could mark a turning point for micropayments — a long-promised but underutilized use case in crypto and beyond — as AI agents reshape how transactions are made.
That’s the key takeaway from newly published analysis by Forrester senior analyst Meng Liu, who argues that MPP may succeed where decades of earlier efforts failed.
Introduced earlier this month, MPP enables AI agents to execute transactions automatically, removing the need for human approval at each step. It is described as an open protocol for coordinating payments between AI agents and services. Liu frames this as a structural shift from human-initiated payments to machine-to-machine transactions.
Micropayments, which are typically small transactions worth a few cents or dollars, have long been seen as a way to monetize digital content, services and data, but have struggled to gain traction at scale.
A major barrier to adoption has been human behavior, including cumbersome digital checkout processes and reluctance to approve small charges, Liu said.
