Greece need not measure its success by the number of company licenses issued or people who own cryptocurrencies. The real opportunity lies in modernizing its financial infrastructure, strengthening competition in banking, and keeping highly skilled professionals in the country.

When it comes to digital assets – assets recorded and transferred on distributed digital ledgers (blockchains), such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana – Greece should not be competing to lead Europe in per capita cryptocurrency use or in the number of companies licensed to issue digital assets. These are the wrong goals because they distract from what matters most: digital assets should be viewed first and foremost as a critical upgrade to Greece’s financial infrastructure. Such an upgrade would not only deliver substantial cost savings and other benefits for the public, but also strengthen competition in the Greek financial sector, while supporting engineers in the sector and other professionals in Greece. Greek policymakers need to recognize these benefits and refocus on what really matters. Here’s why.

Where We Stand Today

With the transitional periods under the EU’s MiCA regulation coming to an end, the first half of 2026 closed one chapter and opened another. The crypto-asset sector no longer operates in a regulatory gray area: it is now a supervised industry subject to a single EU-wide licensing framework, with more than 320 registered providers. The Hellenic Capital Market Commission issued Greece’s first licenses in July. The question, then, is not whether Greece will participate, but what, exactly, it should be aiming for.

The standard answer – “to attract companies” – is the least compelling, as the experience of smaller European countries makes clear. In 2021, Estonia was home to more than half of all registered digital asset providers worldwide, only to subsequently revoke around 80% of their licenses. Estonian experts themselves concluded that the sector had created “neither jobs nor tax revenue.” In Lithuania, a subsidiary of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange became the country’s tenth-largest taxpayer despite employing just fourteen people, only to leave a few months later after failing to secure a license. Portugal kept crypto tax-free for six years and ended up with just one licensed company.

The reason is structural. An EU license is valid throughout the Union, so Greek consumers are already served by providers licensed in other member states. Cyprus and Luxembourg secured the most licenses relative to their size not because they pursued a distinctive crypto strategy, but because they already had well-developed capital markets and institutional financial services sectors. The new license was simply added to that existing base. Companies follow ecosystems; they do not create them. The number of licenses issued is therefore the wrong measure of success.

The Key Implications for Greece

The real opportunity lies elsewhere, and it starts with a crucial distinction. Digital assets are not synonymous with cryptocurrencies. They make it possible to issue, transfer, and settle units of value – whether shares, deposits, bonds, investment fund units, or even the euro itself – on programmable infrastructure. This is an upgrade to the financial system, not a new investment asset class. For Greece, it has three very specific implications.

The first is competition. Greece has the most concentrated banking market in the European Union: its five largest credit institutions control 95% of total banking assets, compared with an EU average of 69%. The IMF reports that the figure for Greece has risen from 69% in 2009. The consequences are far from theoretical. The Hellenic Competition Commission found that Greek banks passed on only half as much of the increase in interest rates to depositors as banks elsewhere in the euro area. In 2023, it also imposed fines totaling more than €41 million on five banks and the Hellenic Bank Association for a concerted practice involving ATM fees and card services.

The government subsequently had to intervene through legislation twice – first in 2024 and then again in 2025 – to abolish a range of fees that competition had failed to eliminate on its own, even as fee and commission income continued to rise. When pricing has to be corrected through legislation rather than the entry of new competitors, the problem is not behavior; it is the structure of the market. The Competition Commission’s own first recommendation is to make market entry easier. The digital asset ecosystem offers precisely that opportunity: a new category of licensed and supervised providers able to offer payment and custody services, as well as savings products, alongside banks. Revolut, with more than two million customers in Greece, already shows what new market entrants can achieve.

The second implication concerns payments and Europe’s control over its own payment infrastructure. Greece has no domestic credit or debit card scheme – a situation shared by thirteen of the euro area’s twenty-one countries – while two-thirds of European card transactions are routed through non-European networks. In practice, payments accounting for much of the €23.6 billion Greece earned from tourism in 2025 were settled through infrastructure controlled from outside Europe. IRIS has shown that Greece can build its own low-cost, widely used payment infrastructure; the digital euro – whose pilot program already includes three Greek institutions – embodies the same principle at the European level.

This is also where the next wave begins. In 2026, some of the world’s largest payments and technology companies – Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare – jointly standardized protocols that allow software, rather than people, to make payments autonomously for data, computing power, and services. Current transaction volumes are negligible, and that needs to be stated plainly: Visa processes the equivalent of this entire ecosystem’s monthly transaction volume in less than one minute. The question is not how big the ecosystem is today, but which currency will become the default once it reaches meaningful scale.

This is where stablecoins and other digital assets backed by conventional, or fiat, currencies come into play. In 2025, the United States enacted the GENIUS Act, establishing a legal framework – broader than a licensing regime alone – that sets the rules for the future use and development of US dollar stablecoins. Today, euro stablecoins account for just 0.2% of the global market; almost all the rest is denominated in dollars. Meanwhile, the infrastructure for agentic commerce – commerce conducted by autonomous digital agents – is taking shape without the euro being built in from the outset.

The third implication concerns Greece more directly. Greeks have contributed far more to applied cryptography and distributed systems than the country’s size would suggest. Yet the vast majority of these researchers and engineers leading the development of this infrastructure work outside Greece. These are highly specialized, well-paid jobs – a far cry from the lower-value-added roles associated with Estonia’s licensing model. Strengthening existing incentives for highly skilled Greeks to return home, alongside establishing university research chairs in these fields, could be achieved at very little cost to the public purse.

Time for a New, More Focused Strategy

None of this requires a risky policy agenda. Two of Greece’s four systemic banks already participate in the European consortium preparing to issue a euro stablecoin, while the Bank of Greece has completed a full simulation of issuing a government bond as a digital token. The challenge is to stop treating these initiatives as regulatory compliance exercises and start making them part of more substantive, concrete strategies. That could mean an initial, small-scale issuance of tokenized Treasury bills, a clear and stable tax framework, and explicit inclusion of digital assets in the next national digital strategy. The current strategy makes no mention of them.

Greece has no reason to compete to issue the most licenses. It does, however, have every reason to pursue cheaper payments for its citizens, greater competition for its banks, European payment and settlement infrastructure rather than dollar-based systems, and jobs for the highly skilled professionals who are currently leaving the country. If it continues to treat digital assets primarily as vehicles for speculation rather than infrastructure, the opportunity will not be lost in a dramatic moment. It will simply be seized elsewhere.

The authors, Vassilis Tziokas, Nikolaos Kamarinakis, and Antonios Backos, together with Georgios Alevras, are leading the establishment of a Digital Assets Working Group at Deon Policy Institute. Deon Policy Institute is the Greek diaspora’s first and only nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) think tank, with a mission to organise and transform the Greek Diaspora into a catalyst for Greece’s progress and prosperity. Through its research and working groups, it draws on a network of experts from the diaspora, academics, and experienced professionals to develop evidence-based policy proposals informed by international expertise and best practices. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not represent the Institute or its Working Groups.