Overview
- The ECB has selected 36 payment service providers and will run a 12‑month pilot in 2027 that will see ECB staff and employees from 19 national central banks make transactions using a beta digital euro.
- Final issuance depends on EU lawmakers passing an enabling regulation targeted for the end of 2026, and the ECB says it could be technically ready for a possible public launch in 2029 if the law is approved.
- Design choices for the retail digital euro include offline tap‑to‑tap payments, limits on how much a person can hold in a wallet, no retail central‑bank accounts, and automatic top‑ups from linked bank accounts for larger purchases.
- The ECB plans a Europe‑built, regionally distributed payments infrastructure with encryption, separation of sensitive data, simulated cyberattack testing and legally set fee caps to ease costs for smaller merchants.
- Officials say the digital euro is meant to sit alongside cash and bank money and to give consumers and merchants a Europe‑run payment option that preserves privacy checks and uses banks or authorised intermediaries to manage customer relationships.