Here's something worth noticing about Europe's payment infrastructure: over 61% of all card transactions on the continent flow through US-based card schemes. That's a massive concentration of payment processing power in foreign hands.

But it gets more striking. Thirteen EU countries have zero alternative—they're completely locked into international systems like Visa, Mastercard, and ApplePay for electronic payments. Not a single domestic option.

This dependency raises real questions. What happens when a US company decides to change terms, raise fees, or face sanctions? European nations lose agency over their own payment rails. It's financial infrastructure built on someone else's foundation.

The ECB data underscores a broader tension: as economies go digital, who controls the pipes matters. Whether it's traditional payment networks or emerging blockchain-based systems, this concentration reveals why many see crypto and decentralized alternatives as potential counterbalance to this kind of centralized control.