ECB Picks 36 Financial Firms for Digital Euro Pilot

The European Central Bank has selected 36 financial firms, including Deutsche Bank and neobank Revolut, to take part in testing the digital euro. The pilot starts in the second half of 2027 and will show whether Europe is ready for its own digital currency. If you hold money in crypto assets or stablecoins, this news marks an early signal of how governments are responding to their growing popularity.

What exactly did the ECB decide?

More than 50 companies applied to join the pilot, and the regulator picked 36 of them. The list includes payments operator Adyen, banking giant Deutsche Bank, neobank Revolut, small-business payments service SumUp, Italian banking group UniCredit, and technology firm Worldline. The ECB published the full list of participants on its own website. Companies applied over several months, and the final selection also weighed the geographic spread of applicants' business across the euro area.

Each selected company will get access to a beta version of the digital euro and will spend twelve months integrating it into its own payment products. This marks the first time private firms get to work with the future currency in practice, not just on paper.

The lineup is no accident. A large bank like Deutsche Bank has millions of customers and complex IT infrastructure, while neobank Revolut is used to rolling out new payment features quickly inside a mobile app. Together they will show whether the digital euro can handle both legacy banking systems and the modern apps millions of Europeans use every day.

How will the digital euro pilot actually work?

Testing will cover four types of payments, and each one will be checked with real people, not only in a lab setting.

• Core idea: person-to-person transfers cover both online and offline transmission of the digital euro without intermediaries.
• in-store payments: selected restaurants, cafeterias, and points of sale will accept the digital euro as a test currency.
• online purchases: some web merchants will build digital euro payment into their checkout flow.
• testers will be ECB and national central bank staff, who will act as the currency's first users.

The difference between payment types matters in practice. A person-to-person offline transfer means money can change hands without an internet connection, say through an NFC chip in a phone. Online purchases, by comparison, will work like an ordinary card payment, except the user draws from a digital euro wallet instead of a bank account.

The first users will be ECB staff and employees of the participating national central banks. Restaurants, cafeterias, and online merchants that agreed to take part will accept payments in the new currency throughout the test period.

Why is the ECB rushing to launch this now?

The reason is competitive, not technical. The ECB openly admits it: dollar-backed stablecoins such as USDT from Tether and USDC from Circle are gaining ground fast across Europe. The regulator fears losing control over the continent's monetary policy if Europeans switch en masse to dollar-pegged tokens for everyday payments.

If that happens, the euro would gradually lose its role as the primary unit of account in digital transactions. That is why the project keeps moving forward even before the legislation is finished.

The scale of the problem for the ECB is fairly concrete. Dollar-backed stablecoins already add up to hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, and a sizable share of that circulates inside Europe for transfers, savings, and online payments. If European businesses and consumers get used to holding digital savings in dollar terms, the euro loses more than just its role as a unit of account. It also loses some of the reach of European monetary policy over the real economy.

The digital euro still lacks a legal framework

The currency has no legal status yet. The bill meant to give the digital euro a legal basis is still working its way through the European Parliament. A key committee backed it earlier this summer, but final approval is still pending. Only after that will the ECB's Governing Council make a separate decision on launch.

The situation in the US runs the opposite way. A law that took effect last month bars the Federal Reserve from issuing a digital dollar through the end of 2030. Europe, by contrast, keeps building the infrastructure ahead of time.

The gap between the two regions' approaches is telling. Lawmakers in Washington treat a digital dollar as a privacy risk and an unnecessary government intrusion into citizens' finances. Officials in Brussels and Frankfurt, on the other hand, treat the digital euro as a tool for protecting financial sovereignty from private, mostly non-European stablecoins.

Critics of CBDCs point to privacy risks: transactions could theoretically be tracked, and access to funds could in theory be blocked centrally. The ECB has not yet given a detailed public answer to these concerns. Digital currency projects run by governments elsewhere have already drawn criticism for giving the state too much control over what citizens can spend money on. The ECB maintains that the digital euro is being designed with a level of privacy comparable to cash, though the full technical details are not yet public.

What should users expect next?

Ordinary Europeans won't notice anything in the near term. The pilot only involves ECB staff, selected shops, and participating firms. If the legislation passes on schedule, the first public version of the digital euro could arrive no earlier than 2029.

Until then, the competition between state-backed digital money and private crypto assets like Bitcoin stays an open question. For stablecoin and crypto users, that means one thing: change over the next few years will come gradually, not all at once.

The broader trend is hard to miss. Governments and central banks around the world are speeding up work on their own digital money precisely because private crypto assets and stablecoins keep growing in popularity. The digital euro is only one entry in that global race.