Digital euro

The ECB presents the digital euro as a modernization of payments. This category starts from a different reading: central bank money held directly by the citizen changes the nature of the relationship between him and the institution that issues it, and none of the promised safeguards is irreversible, since all of them rest on a regulation that can be amended. You will find the file followed closely since 2025: programmability and what it makes technically possible, the interbank track being deployed while public debate focuses on the retail version, the cost of a project estimated in the tens of billions when a proven national network already exists, an offline mode whose anonymity depends on a chip controlled by Apple and Samsung, and Wero, marketed as payment sovereignty yet running on an American provider’s infrastructure. Written with care to separate what the legal texts actually say from what the press releases promise, and without mistaking criticism of one instrument for a rejection of digital payments as such.

The offline digital euro: renting space on a chip

Digital euro

The ECB promises an offline digital euro “just like cash”: no network, anonymous, resilient. But this digital cash can only exist inside a tamper-proof chip in your phone, one whose access is controlled by Apple, Samsung, and Google and which Article 33 of the regulation must legally compel them to open. A capped wallet, an applet updated remotely, anonymity bounded by AML checks at loading and unloading: you no longer own your money, you rent space on a chip. The banknote never had to ask permission to circulate. That difference has a name: the freedom to pay without asking.

The Digital Euro: Aurore Lalucq Is Right, and That’s the Whole Problem

Digital euro

On June 23, 2026, by forty-three votes to fourteen with one abstention, the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs adopted its position on the digital euro. Its chair, French MEP Aurore Lalucq, hailed a “historic day” for the Union’s monetary sovereignty. The plenary vote will follow in early July, then comes the trilogue, […]

Wero : payment sovereignty, Bezos’s servers, the costly oxymoron

Digital euro

On April 21, 2026, the BPCE Group announced with great fanfare the first Wero e-commerce transactions in France. The same day, Netzpolitik.org revealed that EPI had been forced to admit that Wero runs its critical infrastructure on the servers of Amazon Web Services. In November 2025, this same EPI was torpedoing the ECB’s digital euro in the name of sovereignty: a project that, by construction, would have rested on the natively sovereign infrastructure of the Eurosystem. Building Wero on AWS is like building a European Defense Ministry on land leased from a foreign power: the owner always has a spare set of keys, and can cut off the water whenever a federal judge asks him to. Without a public roadmap for migration to a SecNumCloud infrastructure, the slogan “strong and independent solution” remains a fine poster stuck on an American wall.