Overview
- The European Parliament’s ECON committee, which voted 43–14 on Tuesday, approved a negotiating position that sends the digital euro package into trilogue talks with the Council and Commission.
- The committee backed a design that lets the ECB issue a retail digital euro that works online and offline, includes privacy-by-design features such as zero-knowledge proofs, and bars the ECB from accessing users’ personal ID data.
- Lawmakers required safeguards to protect financial stability by making the digital euro non-interest-bearing, imposing individual holding limits, and restricting businesses to short-term digital-euro balances of about 24 hours.
- Distribution will use a layered model with banks, payment service providers, post offices and regulated crypto firms able to offer wallets, a choice that has drawn pushback from banks over adaptation costs estimated between €4–5.8 billion by the ECB and about €18 billion by the European Banking Federation.
- Next steps include a likely plenary confirmation and trilogue talks from July aiming for final approval by year-end, with the ECB planning technical standards in 2026, a 12‑month pilot from mid‑2027, and possible public readiness by 2029 as Europe seeks payment sovereignty from dominant non‑EU networks handling roughly 60–66% of card transactions.