ECB says that the current Digital euro design lacks privacy options

Patrick Hansen, a crypto venture adviser and European digital asset regulation whistleblower, made public the ECB’s presentation titled “Digital Euro Privacy options” recently. The document is only nine slides long and lays out the various user privacy options in the EU’s CBDC, also known as the digital euro.

Apart from concerns about government overreach raised by the European Union’s ambitious digital euro project, the public’s biggest concern is the privacy foundation for the future currency. This concern appears to be unfounded, as the European Central Bank’s (ECB) most recent presentation suggests that user anonymity is not the desired design option.

Recognizing public concern over the CBDC’s privacy, the presentation emphasizes the importance of evaluating the problem from the perspective of other EU policy goals, including anti-money laundering (AML) and countering the financing of terrorism (CFT).

In fact, this bureaucratic jargon means that the digital euro project’s baseline privacy scenario is for all transaction data to be exposed to intermediaries like banks. However, giving a higher level of privacy for low-value transactions remains an option that “could be investigated with co-legislators.”

How is the digital euro different from others?

The whole tone of the document, on the other hand, could be summed up in a single remark from slide four: “User anonymity is not a desirable feature.” According to Hansen, it is uncertain how the digital euro would be different from the conventional fiat-based infrastructure for digital payments at this time.

The European Commission has been actively working with several entities to accelerate the development process of CBDC and recently said it would bring the same in early 2023. 

As TheCoinRise reported in March, the executive board member of the European Central Bank, or ECB, talked about the importance of online and physical stores accepting CBDC. Recently, it had started working with the Eurosystem for experimental prototyping of the customer interface of the digital euro.