Digital euro (a retail CBDC from the European Central Bank)

The digital euro is the project for a digital form of the euro, issued by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the national central banks, so that individuals and businesses can pay with central bank money alongside banknotes and coins: a retail CBDC. As of October 13, 2026 it does not exist. Its legal framework depends on a proposed regulation, COM(2023) 369 (based on Art. 133 TFEU), still being negotiated by the European Parliament and the Council, and the decision to issue it lies with the ECB once the law is adopted.

Where the regulation stands.

• June 28, 2023: the Commission proposes the Regulation on the establishment of the digital euro, COM(2023) 369 (procedure 2023/0212(COD)).
• December 19, 2025: the Council agrees its negotiating position.
• June 23, 2026: Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON) adopts its report by 43 votes to 14, with 1 abstention, and decides to open negotiations with the Council. The rapporteur is Spanish MEP Fernando Navarrete Rojas (EPP).
• July 9, 2026: Parliament's plenary endorses the decision to negotiate.
• As of October 13, 2026: no regulation has been adopted. Parliament's Legislative Observatory lists the file as awaiting Parliament's position in first reading.

According to Parliament (update of September 20, 2026), the main differences between the two mandates concern compensation for payment service providers, the distribution model and holding limits, which have not yet been discussed at political level.

What the proposal provides.

• Legal tender, with mandatory acceptance at face value (Art. 7), and issuance authorized exclusively by the ECB, as a direct liability of the ECB or the national central banks (Art. 4).
• Online and offline payments from the first issuance (Art. 23).
• No interest (Art. 16(8)) and not programmable (Art. 24(2)), although it would support conditional payments.
• Holding limits set by the ECB so that it is not used as a store of value (Art. 16). In the Council's position, the limit must respect an overall ceiling agreed by the Council and reviewed at least every two years. No figure has been set: at the co-legislators' request, the ECB analyzed hypothetical limits of up to €3,000 per person.
• Free basic services for consumers, such as opening and closing the account or paying (Council position).

Privacy. The proposal requires data segregation so that neither the ECB nor the national central banks can directly identify any individual user (Art. 35(4)). For offline payments, neither payment service providers nor central banks would retain transaction data; the provider would only keep funding and defunding data for the device, under anti-money laundering rules (Art. 37). According to the ECB, offline payments would offer a cash-like level of privacy.

What it is not. It is not a crypto-asset or a stablecoin. It would be central bank money, issued and guaranteed by the Eurosystem; a stablecoin is issued by a private company and its value depends on how it manages its reserves. That is also why MiCA would not cover it: MiCA does not apply to the ECB or to central banks acting as monetary authorities (Art. 2(2)(c) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114). A regulated euro stablecoin is an EMT: we explain it in euro stablecoins.

The ECB's timeline. On October 30, 2025, the ECB announced it was moving to the next phase of the project. It plans a 12-month pilot starting in the second half of 2027, with 36 selected payment service providers, and to be ready for a possible first issuance during 2029, if the regulation is adopted before the end of 2026. These are ECB projections, not legal dates.

Official sources: Proposal COM(2023) 369 (EUR-Lex); Legislative Observatory, 2023/0212(COD); European Parliament, Legislative Train: Digital euro; Council of the EU press release, Dec. 19, 2025; ECB press release, Oct. 30, 2025; ECB, FAQs on the digital euro; Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, MiCA.

Framework verified as of October 13, 2026. At Unknown Gravity we integrate payments with regulated stablecoins and build tokenization platforms. The digital euro, if it arrives, would be issued by the Eurosystem and distributed by payment service providers. Talk to us.