Only offline digital euro payments stay between payer and payee

The digital euro will make offline payments invisible to everyone except the two parties involved in the payment.

Commercial banks that handle online transactions are still able to see them, said Piero Cipollone, a member of the ECB’s Executive Board, in an interview published this week.

Banks keep the identities the Eurosystem cannot see

Cipollone was asked whether the ECB would be able to track what each citizen would do with the currency. He said offline payments would go directly from one person to another, with the record available only to the payer and the payee.

He said the Eurosystem “would not be able to identify the users making or receiving payments” online. The ECB released the interview on Monday, August 11. It was done on August 10.

For example, to check for money laundering, Cipollone said that banks involved in a transaction could still find out who the parties were.

Even though the currency is designed to be private, it still has to follow the same rules for reporting as all other money, and the commercial banks that distribute it still have to follow the same identity duties as before.

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