• Digital Euro
• Key Findings

(KF5) Utility and costs: unclear benefits for society

The ECB claims various advantages of the digital euro, including no costs for end-users, universal acceptance in physical shops and online, support for person-to-person payments, “the highest level” of security and privacy, resilience to cyberattacks and technical disruptions, technological independence contributing to Europe’s strategic autonomy, and non-reliance on Internet connectivity (Q1, Q2, Q3). The only tangible advantage compared to cash is the ability to pay digitally and online, while the comparison of the digital euro design to existing digital payment systems in the following table only leaves the legally enforced acceptance throughout the euro area as a clear improvement for the user. Many payment systems can be used for person-to-person payments, online, and at points of sales; and are also free of charge for consumers, with merchants covering the fees. Being a central bank liability makes no effective difference to the vast majority of Europeans, given that bank deposits are generally insured up to €100,000, while digital euro holdings are expected to be limited to at most €3,000 [1] as well as interest-free and thereby less attractive for savings (Q24). The claims of improved resilience to cyberattacks lack supporting evidence in terms of concrete measures provided in public documents (Q25). Using the offline version in case of technical disruptions such as power outages is only possible after a manual funding process which still needs Internet connectivity. Given the convenience option of automatic funding in the online version, it seems questionable to which extent people would have offline digital euros available when their Internet goes down. While the digital euro could reduce the dependence on non-European payment providers, the offline version still depends on proprietary, predominantly non-European hardware. Truely embracing open standards and free software [2] instead of relying on proprietary technology would allow for easier integration with alternative European hardware and end-user devices and help to establish trust in the system (KF6). The high risks of the offline version have been articulated for (KF2), and the online version offers even less privacy than other digital payment systems due to the existence of a central transaction database (KF1).

While having little clear advantages, the digital euro project brings significant disadvantages for euro area citizens: First, with an initial project budget of €1.3 billion (cf. Q27), it is far from being a “cheap (…) form of public money” (Q18), especially when compared to more innovative and cost-efficient digital payment systems [3], with developments costs of less than 1% of that amount (Q27). The high additional costs for mandatory roll-out to all merchants, support, and onboarding (KF4) are not even included in that number. In fact, all costs of the digital euro are eventually borne by the citizens of the euro area, whether they want to use it or not, contrary to the ECB’s claim that the digital euro would be “free for basic use by individual users” (Q21). Second, while the ECB and the European legislation may try to avoid it (Q4), bringing yet another digital payment system to the market will likely further erode the use of physical cash, which is the most power-outage-resilient, inclusive, accessible, and privacy-preserving payment system we know of.

1. 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].
2. Free Software Foundation, What is free software?. https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, 1996.
3. Taler Systems SA, GNU Taler. https://taler-systems.com/, 2024.