Most likely because your country's banks are heavily lobbying against such initiatives.
It's easy to blame Visa and Mastercard, but the reason why the EU doesn't have this is that the EPP (the largest political group in the European Parliament) answers to European banks, which don't want it.
The EU is literally working on an alternative as we speak: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.ht...
I think the cryptocurrency-based implementation is stupid and a product of its time, but the EU is investing a lot of money into a system to push Visa and Mastercard out.
Many countries have their own payment systems already, often widely successful. Integration between these systems has been annoying but things have started to centralize on two or three systems across Europe now.
The EU would obviously benefit from a digital euro, but the banks won't give up without a fight:
https://euperspectives.eu/2026/02/digital-euro-timeline-at-r...
>Private banks are resistant to a digital euro both as a payment method and a store of value. The digital euro is designed to be a free, public payment method, directly challenging fee-based systems operated by banks. This is its key usefulness in terms of sovereignty. But it could also be used as a digital wallet and users may move their money out of private bank accounts to central bank-backed digital euro wallets meaning banks lose out.
So far they have successfully delayed any implementation.
The original release was a proof of concept. That proof of concept is currently being developed into a fully-fledged proposal. Once that proposal is accepted, and legislation is ready, the first actual implementations can begin.
I don't think you can call it a "delay", the project just moves at a glacial pace.
The entire project was never going to finish before 2030. Some banks are upset about it, for sure, but others are in favour.