It started as a weird habit. Midnight, Eschborn. Me, a creative designer with zero background in energy policy, opening yet another European Commission speech instead of going to sleep. My partner thought I'd lost it. Maybe I had. But something kept pulling me back — the feeling that what I was reading wasn't bureaucratic noise. It felt like someone was actually building something.

I want to be honest about what I am and what I'm not. I'm not an analyst, an economist, or a policy expert. I'm a freelance designer working with local companies in the Rhine-Main region — the kind of work where the client calls you by your first name, tells you what's actually going on in their business, and expects honesty back. No account managers. No quarterly review decks. No Umsatz über alles. Just two people trying to make something good together. Think of me as Samwise Gamgee trying to understand Tolkien's geopolitics from inside the story — I don't have the full map, but I'm paying close attention to the road under my hairy feet.

This article is for people like me. Freelancers. Selbstständige. Small studio owners. The local Marketingagentur that's run by an actual human who picks up the phone. The one-person web shop in Wiesbaden. The graphic designer in Mannheim who's been at it for twelve years and never needed a VC round to do good work. If that's you — or if you work with people like that — keep reading.

What I kept reading in those Commission speeches, month after month, was one word: dependency. Dependency on Russian gas. On US cloud infrastructure. On African uranium. On American payment rails. On Chinese manufacturing. On the goodwill of corporations whose quarterly earnings calls we have zero influence over. Every speech framed it as a problem to be solved. But the more I read, the more I started to see it differently — less as a problem list, and more as the blueprint for something genuinely new.

Because the answer to all those dependencies follows the same pattern. Decentralise the infrastructure. Unify the rules. Energy production moves from centralised grids fed by import pipelines to distributed small reactors and local renewables. Finance moves from San Francisco-owned payment rails to a digital currency governed in Frankfurt. Data moves from Virginia servers to federated European clouds. And through all of it — one tightening regulatory framework. The AI Act. The Digital Markets Act. MiCA. The Data Act. Everything becomes smaller, more distributed, harder to take down — but more European in its governance.

Whether that's a new Renaissance or an expensive new form of dependency with a European flag on it — that's what I want to think through here. Together.

One more document. Then I'll go to sleep. (I lied.)

The Spice Must Flow — Europe's Energy Rethink

In Dune, Paul Atreides learns fast: whoever controls the spice controls the universe. Europe spent decades learning the same lesson about natural gas — painfully, and too late. The response to that lesson is what's now being called the SMR strategy.

In March 2026, the European Commission published its Small Modular Reactor framework, targeting first operational European projects by the early 2030s — with a potential capacity of 17 to 53 GW by 2050. The companies doing the building are genuinely European: France's newcleo and EDF Nuward, Italy's Ansaldo Nucleare, UK's Rolls-Royce SMR. GE Hitachi technology also features in the wider alliance, so it's not purely European in origin — but the manufacturing, operations, and governance are being structured to stay close to home.

The raw uranium supply picture is actually more manageable than it sounds. Canada provides roughly 33% of EU uranium imports, Kazakhstan 24%, Australia 10% — Russia accounts for about 15%. That's diversifiable, and Europe is actively diversifying it.

The deeper problem is enrichment. You can mine uranium anywhere, but turning it into reactor-grade fuel requires specialised industrial capacity — and Russia controls an estimated 46% of global uranium enrichment, with Russian companies supplying 38% of enrichment services to EU nuclear utilities as recently as 2023. Europe's own players — Urenco (Netherlands, Germany, UK) and Orano (France) — cover a portion, but not a full replacement.

Then there's Africa. France's exit from Niger tells the story bluntly: after the 2023 military coup, the ruling junta expelled Orano from one of its key uranium mines in the northeast. Macron quietly flew to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to find alternatives. The colonial-era arrangement that had kept French energy embedded in the Sahel for decades is, genuinely, over. What replaces it — and whether Europe simply recreates the same dependency with a different flag and a different time zone — is one of the more uncomfortable questions nobody in the Commission speeches seems eager to answer.

And here's where I have to say what I actually think: for years, we watched energy policy get shaped by corporations whose primary obligation was to shareholders in a different country. Big Oil, Big Gas, Big Grid. I'd call them MAGA-corporations — not necessarily because of the politics, but because the whole logic was the same: maximise extraction, externalise the cost, and leave the locals holding the bill when it falls apart. Europe got left holding a very large bill in 2022. The SMR strategy isn't just a technical solution to an energy problem. It's a statement that we'd rather build our own Millennium Falcon than keep renting space on someone else's Death Star. (Yes, I'm using the same metaphor twice. It still works.)

Follow the Money — The Digital Euro and Crypto's European Chapter

Here's a question I didn't expect to be asking in 2026: what even is money, legally, in Europe? And who owns the infrastructure that moves it?

Right now, the answer to the second question is embarrassing. Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal process the overwhelming majority of everyday European payments — all American infrastructure, all governed under US law. For us — freelancers issuing invoices across borders, small agencies paying contractors in three different countries, Selbstständige whose Stripe account got flagged for no clear reason and took three weeks to resolve — this isn't abstract. It's Tuesday. The ECB has been remarkably candid about this. The digital euro project is explicitly framed as letting Europe "regain ownership of the rails on which its payment system runs." That's not my language. That's Christine Lagarde's. And for once, I think a central banker is saying something we should be genuinely glad to hear.

But the digital euro is only one part of a much larger story happening around money in Europe. The Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA), which became fully applicable in December 2024, made the EU the first major jurisdiction in the world to have a comprehensive crypto regulatory framework. That matters enormously — not because it bans crypto, but because it legitimises it under clear European rules.

What's happening as a result is fascinating. Société Générale's Forge division issued a euro-backed stablecoin — the first bank-issued stablecoin under MiCA — on public blockchain infrastructure. Ripple secured an Electronic Money Institution licence in Luxembourg in January 2026. Circle, the issuer of USDC, got MiCA approval and is issuing a euro stablecoin. Major European banks including Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas are actively building blockchain-based settlement infrastructure for institutional payments.

The ECB's own wholesale experiments are also worth noting: in June 2025, it ran 48 trials through its DLT sandbox, testing blockchain technology for securities settlement. One trial, by Lithuanian fintech Axiology, used open-source code architecturally derived from the XRP Ledger — though in a closed, permissioned environment entirely separate from the public network. The ECB isn't adopting any specific crypto protocol. But it's stress-testing distributed ledger infrastructure seriously, and it clearly likes what it sees.

The picture that emerges isn't "crypto vs. central banks." It's something weirder and more interesting: a layered European monetary system where a public digital euro co-exists with MiCA-regulated stablecoins, blockchain settlement rails, and institutional crypto infrastructure — all under one regulatory roof. The Federation approach to money, if you will. Multiple species, one treaty.

MiCA is live. Engage.

90% — The Digital Infrastructure Problem Nobody Talks About Enough

Here's a number that should bother you more than it does: approximately 90% of Europe's digital infrastructure — cloud compute, software, data storage — is owned and operated by non-European companies. Predominantly American ones. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud. Which means European data — including client briefs, medical records, legal documents, government communications — ultimately flows through infrastructure governed by US law. Including the CLOUD Act, which allows American authorities to request access to data on US-owned servers, anywhere in the world, without notifying the data's actual owner.

The effort to change this has had a rough ride. Gaia-X — the Franco-German initiative announced in 2019 to build a federated European cloud ecosystem — had a genuinely good idea at its core: sovereign, interoperable data spaces where businesses could operate under European rules, with portability and transparency built in. Then AWS, Microsoft, and Google lobbied their way into the governance structure. The MAGA-corporations showed up to the sovereignty meeting and asked for a seat at the table. The original vision got diluted. What remains today is primarily a certification and standards framework — useful, but not the independent European cloud anyone imagined. It's like planning to build your own house and ending up with a very thorough zoning permit.

But real alternatives are being built. In November 2025, the International Criminal Court in The Hague replaced its Microsoft office suite with OpenDesk — an open-source collaboration platform developed by ZenDiS, the German Centre for Digital Sovereignty. The stated reason was blunt: political pressure from Microsoft, and the concrete experience of a senior official being temporarily locked out of his own Outlook account. When digital dependency becomes personal, priorities shift. Fast.

European hyperscaler alternatives are also quietly maturing. OVHcloud (France), IONOS (Germany), Hetzner (Germany), and Exoscale (Switzerland) collectively operate significant infrastructure under European law. They don't match AWS at scale — yet. But "not yet" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Two Futures — Pick Your Ending

The utopia and the dystopia are built from the same materials.

I've been playing out both versions in my head for months, and here's what I've landed on: they're not opposites. They're the same architecture, depending on who ends up holding the keys.

The Digital Euro is the sharpest version of this tension. On one side: freedom from Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and the arbitrary account closures and cross-border friction that freelancers and small companies deal with constantly. On the other side: a state-issued digital currency is, technically, the most legible financial system ever built. Every transaction, timestamped, attributable, permanent. The ECB has promised offline functionality and privacy protections. I believe they mean it. I also know that what a regulation promises on day one and what it enables by amendment ten years later are different things.

Where Do We Actually Stand — Creatives, Freelancers, Local Companies

Let me tell you what I actually care about when I work with someone. Not their procurement process. Not whether they have a standardised creative brief template. I care whether the person I'm talking to has a real stake in what we're building. Whether they'll push back when something isn't right. Whether we can have a coffee and a genuinely honest conversation about what's not working. That's Zusammenarbeit. That's the thing no corporate framework can replicate, and no Umsatz-über-alles growth strategy can manufacture. It's either there or it isn't.

The businesses I want to work with — the ones I think most of us in this space are drawn to — are the Mittelstand companies, the solo founders, the regional agencies, the operators who've been doing their thing for fifteen years and never needed to scale past the point where they could still personally stand behind their work. The companies where the owner takes the call. Where "a quick meeting" actually ends in thirty minutes. Where they'd rather do it right than do it fast.

In a Europe that's decentralising its infrastructure and building real alternatives to the corporate monoculture we've been living in, there is more room for exactly that kind of working relationship. Less US-imported brand template aesthetic. Less "our agency has a team of 200" theatre. More space for someone who actually knows your city, understands your industry, and shows up as a real person — not a service tier.

We translate complexity. The businesses navigating Digital Euro compliance, Gaia-X certification decisions, AI Act obligations, SMR-adjacent energy procurement, MiCA-adjacent payment workflows — they don't have in-house expertise in any of this. And honestly, they don't want a big consultancy to parachute in, charge €400 an hour, and leave behind a 60-slide deck nobody reads. They want someone they can call. Someone who'll give them the honest version. That's us. The designer, the strategist, the communicator who can make these systems legible, human, and actionable — and then sit down over coffee to talk it through.

In the dystopian scenario, being small is still a structural advantage. Compliance complexity scales with size. We run lean, we operate honestly, we don't have three layers of liability management between us and our clients. The freelancer who discloses AI use, keeps client data under GDPR, and runs their practice with actual integrity has a lighter regulatory burden than the agency that scaled fast on vibes and investor money. Small is not a disadvantage. Small is agile. And in an era of corporate capture, small is also trustworthy.

Small is trustworthy. That's the edge.

The honest version of my pink glasses is this: the European project being built right now is slow, imperfect, and regularly captured by the same MAGA-corporation logic it's trying to displace. The lobbying never stops. The hyperscalers don't give up their seat at the table just because you ask nicely. But something is shifting. The tooling, the regulation, the political will — it's pointing in a direction that I genuinely believe leaves more room for the way we want to work. Human. Local. Honest. Together.

I'd rather be designing inside that experiment than watching it from the outside, wondering if it'll be safe enough to join eventually. The Shire was always worth fighting for. We just had to do it from the road.

Personal perspective, not policy analysis. The views here are my own, based on publicly available sources listed below. For primary sources and ongoing developments, see ec.europa.eu, ecb.europa.eu, and euratom.eu.

Borislav Sashov Ivanov is a creative designer based in Eschborn, Germany — working under the brand Sashov. He's a geek, a nerd, and a genuine believer in local Zusammenarbeit over corporate theatre. He works with companies and people who want honest, human communication — and who'd rather have a real conversation than a discovery call. This is the second post on sashov.tech.