Q27: How much would the digital euro project cost the Eurosystem?

The European Central Bank answers:

Investing in the digital euro is key to ensuring our currency and payments sector remains fit-for-purpose in the digital age.

Some of the digital euro components, such as payment settlement, would be developed internally within the Eurosystem. For others, like the offline services component, we have established framework agreements with external providers. Framework agreements do not involve any payment and include safeguards allowing the scope to be adjusted in line with changes in the legislation.

Total development costs, comprising both externally and internally developed components are estimated to amount to €1.3 billion, while annual operating costs are projected to be around €320 million. The Eurosystem is continuing preparations in response to calls from euro area leaders to be ready for potential issuance as soon as possible. However, the necessary legislation has not yet been adopted. The work is therefore structured in modules to allow gradual scaling and to limit financial commitments.

The Eurosystem would bear the costs of the establishment of the digital euro scheme and infrastructure, just as it does for the production and issuance of euro banknotes – which, like the digital euro, are a public good. As with banknotes, these costs would be covered by “seigniorage” (the income the ECB earns from issuing money) even if digital euro holdings were small compared with banknotes in circulation. The ECB is committed to keeping costs low by reusing existing infrastructure as much as possible, while still delivering a digital euro that brings value to consumers and merchants.

In line with its nature as a public good, the digital euro would be free for basic use for consumers and cost efficient for European merchants. The Eurosystem would not charge or benefit from any digital euro transaction fees.

We answer them:

The framework agreements sum up to €1.164 billion [1], leaving less than €250 million for in-house development of the settlement infrastructure— despite it being the apparently more complex heart of the system [2]. Compared with the costs of the external components, this does not seem a lot. Contrary to its proclaimed goal of keeping costs low by re-using existing infrastructure, the ECB has not considered modern and already developed digital payment systems (KF6), such as GNU Taler—which is free software and has been created with less than 1

The answer largely passes over the high cost of initial integration and continuous support faced by merchants throughout the whole euro area to comply with the legally mandated acceptance of the digital euro (cf. Q5). It also forgets to mention costs to remedy anticipated fraud in the offline version (cf. Q7), (the PSPs’) typical operational losses due to illicit access to digital euro accounts in the online version, or compensation for data breaches from the ECB’s central database of all digital euro transactions (KF1). Finally, it ignores the costs of changing design requirements from the legislation process that is still ongoing in parallel to the implementation (cf. Q18), and the possibility of a complete project failure where all invested money would be a loss.

According to the proposed regulation, “the digital euro should be issued (…) by converting payment service providers' central bank reserves into digital euro holdings” [3]. Hence, no seigniorage income will be generated since the central bank will not acquire any new assets by issuing digital euros.

  1. E. Bank, ECB selects digital euro service providers, ECB, Oct. 2, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/intro/news/html/ecb.mipnews251002.de.html [Accessed: Jan. 14, 2026].
  2. European Central Bank, Progress on the preparation phase of a digital euro: Closing progress report. Publications Office of the European Union, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2866/3423337 [Accessed: Jan. 19, 2026].
  3. European Commission, Proposal for a regulation of the european parliament and of the council on the establishment of the digital euro, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52023PC0369