At the same time, we want to prevent the introduction of a digital euro from leading to instability in the banking and financial system, as described at the start of my speech. We are therefore considering measures at this early stage to prevent an excessive and abrupt shift of deposits from commercial banks into the digital euro.
Two kinds of upper limit come into consideration for this purpose: fixed upper limits or “soft” upper limits in the form of threshold values above which the interest rate becomes unattractive – the keyword here being “tiered remuneration”. Fixed upper limits would allow for an effective limitation of the amount of digital euro in circulation.