Public Digital Cash in the Euro Area: Scenario-Based Evidence on the Digital Euro, Cryptocurrency Competition and Adoption Risk

The digital euro has moved from a general central-bank digital currency (CBDC) concept to a concrete Eurosystem project, situated between public digital cash, private payment innovation, and crypto-asset competition. This article develops a documentary and policy matrix analysis of the digital euro as a potential form of public digital cash in the euro area. The study applies manual thematic coding to a 37-item corpus of central-bank reports, EU regulatory materials, Slovak and Central European survey evidence, and selected studies in the cryptocurrency, stablecoin, CBDC and privacy-engineering literature. The revised methodology distinguishes the analysis from prospective scenario forecasting: it does not predict a single future or apply morphological scenario construction. Still, it translates official scenario drivers into comparable design orientations and governance requirements. The analysis assesses four design orientations: privacy-oriented, adoption-oriented, financial-stability-oriented, and innovation-oriented digital euro designs. The findings show that the digital euro should not be evaluated as a cryptocurrency substitute, but as regulated public-money infrastructure designed to preserve access to central-bank money in an increasingly digital payment environment. The analysis identifies five persistent design tensions: complementarity with cash versus fears of substitution, privacy protection versus anti-money-laundering compliance, payment sovereignty versus private-sector innovation, financial stability safeguards versus user attractiveness, and technical resilience versus implementation cost. Slovak and euro-area evidence indicates that awareness and potential use remain conditional on trust, privacy, communication and existing payment habits. At the same time, the Bulgarian euro-changeover context illustrates the importance of institutional trust in Central Europe. The article contributes to FinTech research by linking digital-euro governance to stablecoin regulation under MiCA, payment sovereignty, privacy-enhancing technologies, offline secure elements and adoption risk.