Europe: central bank digital currency features

An EU survey on Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) - cryptocurrency from a central bank or state - reveals privacy concerns among most respondents. CBDC are closely related to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH), but with the difference that these coins are from central banks or even state governments whilst BTC and ETH are private currencies. As of 2021, no CBDC officially exist as central banks worldwide are still testing these - such as Sweden's Riksbank that is testing its e-krona, or China that aims to launch its digital yuan or E-CNY project around the time of the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022. When European consumers were asked on what features they would like to see from a potential "digital euro", privacy was found in the top five rankings of nearly 6,000 of the survey's roughly 8,200 respondents. In more than half of these 6,000 rankings, privacy was listed on rank one - meaning it was the most important feature for the survey respondents. By comparison, security featured in around 5,600 rankings but only made it onto rank one in about 1,400 of them - revealing security was an important feature, but relatively less so than privacy.

How would you rank, in order of importance, the features that a digital euro should offer?

Characteristic	Rank 1 (most important)	Rank 2	Rank 3	Rank 4	Rank 5 (least important)
Privacy	3,382	1,126	545	408	388
Security	1,397	1,495	1,099	916	680
Absence of additional costs	704	1,078	1,401	1,100	857
Offline use	595	1,393	665	605	652
Usability across the euro area	859	648	730	816	795
Ease of use	368	564	793	926	1,000
Speed of transaction settlement	265	513	827	905	942
Integration with current smartphones/terminals	294	541	582	729	779
Availability of a dedicated physical device	47	139	254	263	294

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Release date

April 2021

More information

Region

Survey time period

October 12, 2020 to January 12, 2021

Number of respondents

8,221*

Age group

13 years and older

Special properties

Public consultation: survey was publicly accessible for consumers on the source's website. For more information, see the "Details" button.

Method of interview

Online survey

Supplementary notes

* The source explicitly states that due to the set-up of the survey, the sample of respondents is "biased" and "do not represent the euro area population". For instance:

"Men account for 87 percent of citizen respondents";
"A third of the professionals identify themselves as tech companies";
The respondents were from the EU member states, either within the euro area or outside of it - meaning this excludes the United Kingdom. However, "most contributions originate from three countries: 47% from Germany, 15% from Italy and 11% from France. Five other European countries provided 1-5% of replies [from highest to lowest: the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Spain and Portugal], with the rest accounting for less than 1% each".

The figures provided show the top five rankings the survey respondents gave to the question of "How would you rank, in order of importance, the features that a digital euro should offer?". The exact they could choose from were: