European Central Bank sets out the case and core design features for a digital euro as legal tender

In a keynote speech, European Central Bank Executive Board member Piero Cipollone outlined how a digital euro would provide a universally accessible digital form of central bank money for everyday transactions, alongside cash. He framed the project as a way to preserve payment choice while strengthening the euro area’s autonomy and resilience as retail payments become increasingly digital. The speech highlighted the decline in cash use between 2019 and 2024, including at physical points of sale where cash fell from 72% to 52% of transactions by volume and from 47% to 39% by value. Cipollone also pointed to reliance on non-European payment solutions, noting that two-thirds of card-based transactions in the euro area are processed by international schemes and that in 13 of 20 euro area countries daily in-store payments depend entirely on them. He described a digital euro as a European infrastructure with open standards and a European-wide acceptance network that could help European payment companies scale and innovate, referencing findings from the ECB’s innovation partnerships with market participants. For operational resilience, the envisaged design includes infrastructure distributed across at least three regions with multiple servers, an ECB-provided digital euro app enabling users to switch between providers, and offline functionality to allow payments when connectivity is unavailable. Cipollone emphasised that delivering the project would require cooperation among the ECB, national central banks, the European Commission, legislators and wider stakeholders through ongoing dialogue and engagement.