The European Payments Council (EPC), an international not-for-profit association that aims to support and promote European payments integration and development, has released the results of its poll on the impact of blockchain on payments.

The poll was organized earlier this summer and was mainly intended to know what professionals working in the payments industry truly think when it comes to blockchain. The question asked to all interested stakeholders was:

“How may blockchain technology impact the European payments landscape by 2025?”

Though most of the voters agreed that blockchain will have an impact and is not just a fad, they are divided regarding the extent of this impact on payments. According to the results:

• 36% respondents see impact of the technology in some niches or aspects of the payments activity, meaning adoption of blockchain technology for specific purposes.
   
• 30% respondents see emergence of blockchain-based innovative customer payment solutions.
   
• 24% voters believe that the technology will impact the overall infrastructure underlying the payments mass market. These voters expect the blockchain to become the main pillar in the technological paradigm shift.
   
• 10% votes don’t see any significant impact.

The European Union has been very optimistic about blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) and is home for many startups and leading companies in this space. In April, the European Central Bank was reported to have launched some experimental work with DLTs.

“[T]he Eurosystem stands ready to help the industry co-ordinate its efforts to work on standardisation and interoperability both in the payments and in the post-trade domain”, Yves Mersch, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, said. “It goes without saying that when accessing the DLT network, the right level of access and data protection requirements have to be respected.”