The Digital Euro: A Briefing for Non-French Readers


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On 9 July 2026, the European Parliament approved its negotiating mandate on the digital euro regulation by 416 votes to 169, with 22 abstentions. Closed-door negotiations with the Council opened in September. A political agreement is targeted before the end of 2026, a twelve-month pilot for the second half of 2027, and first issuance possibly in 2029. Three of the decisions that matter most have not yet been made.
About this page. This site is written in French, for French readers, and argues that physical cash should be legally protected as the digital euro is built. This page exists because parts of the record are hard to find in English, and because we would rather be read critically than not read at all. Every figure below is sourced. Where we hold a position, we say so plainly and separate it from the facts.


What the digital euro is
A retail central bank digital currency for the euro area, with three defining features.
It is a direct liability of the European Central Bank. Money in a current account today is a claim on a commercial bank, insured up to €100,000. For a private individual, only banknotes are central bank money. The digital euro would add a second such form, in account-based rather than physical form.
Distribution is intermediated. The ECB will not hold customer relationships. Banks and payment service providers open the wallets, run identity checks and handle the customer. This matters more than critics usually allow: the ECB would not see your full statement, but your bank would, exactly as it does today.
It would carry legal tender status. Acceptance would be mandatory at face value, with exemptions for very small merchants.
Two modes are planned: an online mode routed through Eurosystem infrastructure, and an offline mode designed to work without connectivity, whose technical arrangements remain to be settled in the final text.


Timeline
DATE
STEP
Oct 2020
ECB report on a digital euro opens the debate
Jun 2023
Commission tables the draft regulation, COM(2023) 369 final
Oct 2025
ECB closes the preparation phase, moves to technical scale-up
Dec 2025
Council of the EU adopts its general approach
24 Mar 2026
Governing Council settles on a €3,000 holding limit for the pilot
23 Jun 2026
ECON committee adopts its position, 43 for, 14 against, 1 abstention
9 Jul 2026
Plenary adopts the negotiating mandate, 416 for, 169 against, 22 abstentions
15 Jul 2026
36 payment providers selected for the pilot
Sep 2026
Negotiations open with the Irish Council presidency
End 2026
Target for political agreement
H2 2027
Twelve-month pilot
2029
Earliest possible issuance
One procedural point that is often missed: the regulation will not oblige the ECB to issue. It removes the legal obstacle. The decision to issue would remain with the Governing Council, taken after the legal framework is adopted.

The four parameters that decide everything
Public debate tends toward the symbolic. The substance sits in four technical settings.
Holding limit. €3,000 for the pilot phase. The ECB has written to the ECON committee that its work identified no financial stability risk below that level. The Bundesbank favours €1,500 to €2,500. Copenhagen Economics estimates potential deposit outflows of €739 billion at a €3,000 limit, against euro area overnight deposits of roughly €12,200 billion in spring 2026.
The stated rationale is bank disintermediation, and it is a real constraint: an unlimited CBDC would give every citizen a direct central bank account and drain the commercial banks that finance the economy. But note what the limit implies. No other form of central bank money is capped. A resident may hold unlimited banknotes; a bank may hold unlimited reserves. The digital euro would be the first central bank money designed from the outset with an administered per-person holding cap.
Remuneration. Zero, neither positive nor negative. This is a consistent ECB position. Combined with the cap, it deliberately confines the instrument to payments rather than savings.
Programmability. Excluded in the current text: no expiry dates, no usage restrictions attached to the units held. Opponents should be precise here or lose the argument. Programmable money, where the units themselves carry rules, is what the text prohibits. Programmable payments, conditional or recurring instructions, already exist in the form of direct debits and raise a different question.
Privacy. The parliamentary mandate requires that the ECB be unable to directly identify users' purchases, mandates zero-knowledge proof technologies, and bans commercial exploitation of the data. The exact guarantee for online payments, and the technical arrangements for offline use, remain open.
Also worth noting: businesses would not be able to hold digital euros, except to accumulate incoming payments for a maximum of twenty-four hours. Basic services would be free.

The case for the project, stated fairly
Payments sovereignty. European electronic payments depend heavily on non-European operators: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay. Several member states have no domestic card scheme at all. On 6 March 2022, Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia within hours, by corporate decision. Cards issued in the country stopped working abroad, and cards issued abroad stopped working there. Whatever one thinks of that decision, it established that a payment network can be switched off remotely by a private foreign actor.
The stablecoin response. The United States has ruled out a retail dollar CBDC and backed regulated private stablecoins instead. The stablecoin market stands at roughly $315 billion across 382 recorded tokens, and effectively all circulating supply is dollar-denominated. MiCA-compliant euro stablecoins totalled about $674 million in June 2026, under 1% of the global market, and the largest of them is issued by a US company.
Resilience and cost. A payment system resting entirely on interconnected private actors is fragile. The offline mode is presented as the answer. The ECB estimates around €1.3 billion of investment to launch, plus €320 million in annual running costs.
We do not think these arguments are frivolous. The objective is legitimate. What is contestable is the parameters chosen to reach it, and the absence of a firm guarantee on cash in exchange.

The serious objections
A currency with administered settings. Money whose holdable amount is administered, which bears no interest, and whose conditions of use rest on a revisable institutional decision is not money in the full sense. It is a conditional payment instrument. The €3,000 cap is not fixed in the regulation: it is explicitly designed to be adjusted, upward or downward, before and after deployment, by a non-elected authority operating within parameters that are themselves amendable.
The decisive questions moved out of public view. The holding limit, the degree of traceability and the financing of the infrastructure were all referred to closed negotiations between Parliament, Council and Commission. The July 2026 vote did not settle these questions. It established that they would be settled elsewhere.
Residual privacy. The commitment binds the ECB. It does not bind intermediaries, who will see transactions as they see card payments today. The difference with cash is not one of degree but of kind: a cash payment generates no data anywhere, for anyone. The only functional equivalent would be a genuinely non-tracing offline mode, which is exactly what the final text must decide.
Drift from complement to substitute. Officials are consistent that the digital euro will complement cash, not replace it. That commitment is sincere as stated. It says nothing about the actual trajectory. Cash fell to 52% of euro area point-of-sale payments by number in 2024, from 59% in 2022. In France it went from 68% in 2016 to 43% in 2024, the first year cards overtook it. An instrument can disappear without ever being banned: it is enough for acceptance to become costly for merchants, for ATMs to thin out, and for branches to stop handling deposits.
And the demand is still there. The same ECB study found 62% of euro area consumers consider it important to retain the option of paying in cash, up from 60% in 2022. Demand for cash remains a majority position even as its use declines.

Sweden: the only real-world test
The Swedish case is worth knowing accurately, because it is routinely misdescribed.
Sweden never proposed banning cash. No bill was ever tabled. What happened is more instructive: cash disappeared through accumulated private decisions, each rational in isolation. Banks stopped handling cash at branches. Merchants stopped accepting it, citing robbery risk, then handling time, then difficulty depositing takings. Consumers adopted cards and the Swish app. Nobody decided to eliminate cash. Together, they did.
How far it went. Per the Riksbank's 2026 payments report, 5% of Swedes paid cash for their most recent in-store purchase, against roughly 10% a year earlier and around 40% fifteen years ago. Cards account for 92% of in-store purchases. One person in three who tried to pay cash was refused. Notably, close to half of respondents view the decline of cash negatively, up from 36% in 2022, with the sharpest criticism among over-65s and outside major cities.
Why the country reversed. Three publicly stated reasons: digital exclusion, acknowledged by the minister responsible for public administration; resilience and defence, in a country that joined NATO and borders the Baltic; and dependence on private operators. The Riksbank now advises households to keep roughly 1,000 kronor per adult at home, about €90, in mixed denominations, enough for a week of essentials, and to hold several means of payment against disruption, crisis or, in the worst case, war. In April 2026, a technical failure at a Swedbank supplier blocked payments for several days; customers could not buy food or medicine.
What the law does. Act 2026:769, passed 27 May 2026 and in force since 1 July 2026, requires grocery stores and pharmacies to accept cash at staffed physical points of sale. The obligation is capped at 0.1 times the annual price base amount, roughly SEK 5,900 or €530 in 2026, and limited to 25 coins per transaction. Exemptions apply where acceptance would compromise staff safety, where handling costs risk closing the outlet, or where there is legitimate reason to refuse a particular sale. Credit institutions must also maintain sufficient nationwide cash deposit points; the Swedish Bankers' Association has indicated full compliance only during 2027.
Do not overstate it. The scope is narrow, the cap is low, the exemptions are broad, and enforcement is criticised as underspecified. Cash use continues to fall. The law guarantees a residual right; it does not restore a practice.
But that is the point. A country does not legislate to protect a residual practice unless it concludes that the practice performs a function nothing else performs.
Norway went further: a law in force since October 2024 fines physical retailers that refuse cash. In France, article R. 642-3 of the criminal code already penalises a professional refusing euro cash without legitimate reason; the weakness is enforcement, and the absence of any obligation on banks to maintain branches or ATMs.

Where enforcement actually points
One argument recurs in support of traceability: anti-money-laundering. The objective is legitimate. The empirical record is weaker than the rhetoric.
India, 2016. The largest cash restriction ever attempted. Notes representing about 86% of currency in circulation were voided overnight. The Reserve Bank of India's 2017-18 annual report records that 99.3% of demonetised notes returned to the banking system. Either black money was not held in cash, invalidating the diagnosis, or it was and was recycled without obstacle, invalidating the method.
Nigeria, 2021-2023. The IMF reported in May 2023 that 98.5% of eNaira wallets had never been used. Forcing adoption through cash withdrawal limits produced shortages, protests and riots days before a presidential election, and a shift toward bitcoin rather than the CBDC.
What investigators themselves report. Europol's 2023 financial crime report notes that 70% of criminal groups use basic laundering techniques. The French Senate's report on drug trafficking observes that crypto-asset transactions are recorded indefinitely on a public ledger and are therefore potentially fully traceable, unlike cash transactions. Europol dismantled a €700 million laundering network in late 2025 precisely by following on-chain traces. The constraint is not missing data. It is analytical capacity, standardisation and cross-border cooperation.
And the structural point. A digital euro capped at a few thousand euros per person, unavailable to legal entities, is of no operational use to organised crime. Whatever surveillance it enables falls, by construction, on ordinary payments by ordinary people.

The global picture
Per the Atlantic Council's CBDC tracker, updated May 2026: 146 countries and monetary unions are exploring a CBDC, representing over 98% of global GDP, up from 87 in May 2022. Seventy-seven are in advanced stages, 41 in pilot. Three have launched a retail CBDC.
Those three are the Bahamas, Jamaica and Nigeria, and all three face adoption far below expectations. A Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City study of the Caribbean CBDCs is worth reading in full: central banks read consumer indifference as digital unfamiliarity or apathy and responded with education campaigns, with no measurable effect on circulation. The authors suggest consumers may be neither ignorant nor apathetic, but simply practical. None of these currencies demonstrated a concrete advantage over existing payment methods.
Meanwhile, Canada, Australia and Norway have deprioritised retail CBDC work. The United States went further: an executive order in January 2025, then the GENIUS Act in July 2025 establishing a federal stablecoin framework, then a four-year statutory ban. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the Senate 85-5 on 22 June 2026 and the House 358-32, and became law on 10 July 2026 without presidential signature. It bars the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC until 31 December 2030.
The euro area is currently the only major advanced economy pursuing a retail CBDC. That does not settle whether the project is right. It does dispose of the claim that it is inevitable.

What we think, stated separately
Everything above is documented. What follows is our position, and readers should weigh it as such.
We do not call for the digital euro to be abandoned. The sovereignty problem it addresses is real, and we have described the case for it here as fairly as we can.
We hold that a banknote has one property nothing else has: it cannot be discounted remotely, capped, dated, restricted in use, or observed. That is not a legal guarantee, revocable by a vote. It is a physical constraint. Building an entirely account-based form of central bank money does not create the outcomes people fear. It converts practical impossibilities into administrative decisions. That is a different thing, and it is enough to warrant close attention.
We therefore hold that the guarantees in the current text should be judged against five conditions, three of which are being decided right now behind closed doors:
  1. That the exclusion of programmable money be a substantive principle, not a provision amendable by delegated act.
  2. That the regulation on the legal tender status of cash be adopted alongside, with effective sanctions, rather than years later.
  3. That the offline mode be genuinely non-tracing, or not be presented as the equivalent of a banknote.
  4. That any revision of the holding limit be bounded, public and adversarial, not left to a non-elected authority.
  5. That no cardinal parameter be modifiable unilaterally without returning to the co-legislators.
Those are conditions of procedure, not promises of outcome. They are also the only commitments anyone can honestly undertake on a file whose final text is not yet written.
Sources
The full site is in French.
vivelecash.fr  ·  sourced dossiers on physical cash, the digital euro and the freedom to pay. Every claim is sourced at the foot of each page. Free to reproduce with attribution.