Excellent. From some dealings with a major credit card digital transactions team in the EU, they are acting on the premise that initial digital wallets are an implementation upgrade of current online and phone app payment wallets (google, apple).
Rhis infrastructure is going to take years of work and education for governments, consumers and organizations who are not actually building it in 2026.
This is exactly the dangerous half-truth that keeps repeating. If digital wallets are treated as a linear upgrade of payments infrastructure, then all the hard questions get deferred.
The technical rollout will take years. But the real gap isn’t education or maturity—it’s intent. These systems are already acquiring agency, defaults, and discretionary power long before governments or users understand the consequences.
When wallets evolve into policy-bearing intermediaries—deciding eligibility, routing access, enforcing rules—the problem stops being payments plumbing and becomes constitutional. Who do they answer to? Who can override them? Who bears liability when defaults harden into outcomes?
Excellent. From some dealings with a major credit card digital transactions team in the EU, they are acting on the premise that initial digital wallets are an implementation upgrade of current online and phone app payment wallets (google, apple).
Rhis infrastructure is going to take years of work and education for governments, consumers and organizations who are not actually building it in 2026.
This is exactly the dangerous half-truth that keeps repeating. If digital wallets are treated as a linear upgrade of payments infrastructure, then all the hard questions get deferred.
The technical rollout will take years. But the real gap isn’t education or maturity—it’s intent. These systems are already acquiring agency, defaults, and discretionary power long before governments or users understand the consequences.
When wallets evolve into policy-bearing intermediaries—deciding eligibility, routing access, enforcing rules—the problem stops being payments plumbing and becomes constitutional. Who do they answer to? Who can override them? Who bears liability when defaults harden into outcomes?