The digital euro needs explanation, not reassurance.

The digital euro is not a cryptocurrency and not a replacement for cash, but an additional digital means of payment issued by the European Central Bank, with the same status as banknotes. One goal is to make European payment infrastructure less dependent on non-European card networks.

That is a legitimate and even sensible policy goal. Payments in Europe rely heavily on a few large, non-European providers, which is a vulnerability during geopolitical tension. The problem is not the goal, but how the ECB communicates about it.

Questions about how much the ECB can see of individual transactions are typically met with general assurances that 'privacy is a priority', without technical detail on how offline payments or privacy-preserving processing actually work. That is insufficient for a product that literally affects every citizen in the eurozone.

Compare this to how banking is explained: interest rates, deposit guarantee schemes and supervisory rules are widely documented and publicly checkable. Comparable, accessible documentation for the digital euro is still largely missing at the level of the ordinary citizen.

Critics point to real risks: a digital euro with a central ledger could, in theory, make detailed payment behaviour visible to the issuing authority unless technical safeguards explicitly rule that out. The possibility of holding limits also raises questions about how those limits are set and adjusted.

These concerns are not paranoid; they are exactly the kind of questions a central bank should answer with concrete, technical detail rather than soothing language.

The ECB rightly notes that the design is not final and that lawmakers, not the central bank alone, ultimately decide on safeguards such as privacy and limits. That is true: the European Parliament has a substantial role here, and public consultations have already led to changes.

So it is not the case that there is no democratic oversight. But an ongoing legislative process is no excuse to leave technical questions unanswered; clear explanation is most valuable precisely during such a process, for the public debate.

My argument is simple: publish technical whitepapers in plain language alongside the legal texts, explain per scenario what is and is not visible to which party, and be explicit about what remains undecided instead of hiding it behind reassuring sentences.

Trust in a central means of payment is not built with marketing language, but with verifiable, technical transparency. As long as that is missing, scepticism remains understandable, even if the underlying idea is not necessarily wrong.