TL;DR:
Within the framework of the community regulatory talks held in Brussels in early September, the government of Italy presented a formal initiative to exempt retail payments with the digital euro below €10 from fees. This measure, presented under the narrative of financial relief for merchants, constitutes a new state attempt to intervene in market mechanisms to accelerate the adoption of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
The proposal contemplates establishing a maximum cap of €0.02 per transaction or a total fee waiver for low-value transactions. European diplomats confirmed that the Italian delegation seeks to mitigate the financial burden assumed by independent points of sale. However, this state maneuver conceals the true nature of the digital euro: a system designed and controlled by the ECB that is intrinsically opposed to the principles of financial freedom that define Bitcoin and the rest of the original cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin was born as an alternative system to traditional finance to empower individuals. In contrast, CBDCs like the digital euro are instruments that grant governments the potential for absolute control over the population’s finances. The transactional facilities now proposed for collecting everyday consumption, such as buying coffee or bread, could be the Trojan horse to accustom the population to a financial infrastructure where every cent is traceable by the state issuer.
The architecture of the European project establishes that basic use of the currency will be free for individual users, a populist strategy to promote its initial use. However, the legislation in process must set limits on the charges that financial intermediaries and point-of-sale terminal operators apply to merchants.
The Italian approach incorporates the so-called no worse off principle, aimed at ensuring that establishments do not face costs higher than those of current payment alternatives. This standard, which aims to guarantee equal conditions against private credit and debit card schemes, actually reveals an attempt by the State to “compete” against the private sector through regulations favorable to its own monetary system.
Likewise, the deliberations cover the functioning of offline payments. Data from the negotiating teams suggest that this mechanism would allow direct settlements between devices without an active internet connection. Although presented with a dynamic similar to physical money, privacy risks and the intrinsic traceability of centralized digital systems persist, unlike cash or decentralized cryptocurrencies that guarantee true anonymity.
The community banking sector and the ECB view the proposal as a way to accelerate the system’s penetration. Representatives of the credit industry point out that the absence of fees will require alternative mechanisms to amortize the technological costs of integration, which raises questions about who will ultimately assume these costs or what new regulations will be imposed to finance the state control infrastructure.
The European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission have scheduled the continuation of the tripartite dialogues for the end of 2026. In this stage, the final drafting of the monetary regulation will be defined before the start of the issuance phase estimated by the ECB for 2029, thus consolidating the legal framework for a tool that, under the guise of efficiency, seeks to limit financial freedom and the development of a decentralized and prosperous crypto sector.
