Digital euro

The regime itself mandates, pilots or funds privacy-preserving technology.

What Digital euro actually says

A central bank designing confidentiality into money on purpose is the most direct evidence that European regulators do not equate privacy with illegality. The design is two-tier. Online payments are pseudonymous to the Eurosystem, with intermediaries rather than the ECB holding identity. Offline payments are meant to be cash-like: the data stays between payer and payee, with no intermediary or central bank visibility. The EDPB and EDPS pushed for exactly that in their 2023 joint opinion. Critics fairly note that the online tier still leaves a full intermediary-held record, and that holding and transaction caps will decide how much cash-likeness survives. Parliament confirmed its negotiating mandate on 9 July 2026; the ECB targets a pilot from 2027 and possible issuance in 2029.

What this means for confidential transactions

Bubble is built for exactly this shape of obligation: amounts and balances live on chain as ciphertexts, computation happens without decryption, and the only disclosure path is an on-chain access list through which an authorized party - an auditor, a supervisor, a counterparty - can request scoped decryption. That is confidentiality from the public, not from the regulator.