[11]  The upshot is that more firms have been protected and more jobs have been saved. Without the ECB’s policies, we estimate that over one million more people would have lost their jobs. [12]  But we are not out of the woods yet. With the tremendous progress made on vaccine technology, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel. But we still cannot see exactly how long that tunnel is. We will continue to face a period of high uncertainty until more people have been vaccinated against the virus. In this setting, it is crucial that the bridge for SMEs remains in place for as long as needed. The ECB will help ensure that firms and families can access the finance they need to weather this storm – and that they can do so in the confidence that financing conditions will not tighten prematurely. That commitment is the best way to provide certainty to all sectors of the economy and to bring stability back to the euro area swiftly. And this, in turn, is the best contribution we can make to delivering on our mandate of price stability. 5/8  As Goethe said, “Im Idealen kommt alles auf die élans, im Realen auf die Beharrlichkeit an.”[13] Reality is currently hard for many firms and the future remains uncertain. And so we will persist and persevere until the pandemic emergency has passed.
In the field of blockchain technology, the world has also considerably changed over the past year, with the rise of decentralised finance, the success of non-fungible tokens (NFT), not to mention the first, sometimes spectacular, "clashes” between these new ecosystems and regulatory authorities, in countries as different as China and the United States. 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  2. Faced with this changing world, how should we, as central banks and financial sector supervisors, position ourselves? First of all, to be relevant in a changing world, we need to be able to distinguish what does not change. And fundamentally, what does not change in the financial sector is the need for confidence. Consumers of financial services need to have confidence: in the security of transactions, in the protection of their assets and in their freedom of choice. The players in the sector also need to have confidence: in each other, because they remain interdependent, in the rules of the game, i.e. in the regulatory conditions under which they can carry out their activity. Central banks and supervisors clearly have a role to play in maintaining this confidence, in all the forms I have just mentioned. In this respect, I would like to share with you three convictions: Firstly, the mechanisms of confidence cannot be replaced by “algorithmic” confidence, i.e.