For three years the euro existed only as an accounting unit
The euro launched on 1 January 1999, but nobody could hold one. For three years it lived only in bank ledgers and financial markets, replacing an older accounting unit one for one. Coins and notes finally arrived on 1 January 2002, and within about two months the old national currencies had vanished.
Leaders settled on the name in Madrid on 16 December 1995. Today the euro is the official money of 21 of the EU's 27 members, used daily by 358 million people in the eurozone, and more than 200 million others use currencies pegged to it. It ranks second to the US dollar as a reserve currency and in trading volume, and by December 2019 over €1.3 trillion in cash was circulating. The European Central Bank alone sets monetary policy, while national central banks help print, mint and distribute the cash.
Every coin carries a shared face, designed by Luc Luycx, and a national face chosen by the issuing country, and any euro coin works anywhere in the zone. To sidestep the EU's many languages, the shared side uses only the Latin spelling and Arabic numerals. Its map originally showed just the 15 members of 2002; from 2007 or 2008 most coins switched to a map of wider Europe, but the 1, 2 and 5 cent pieces kept the old design. EU legal texts oddly write the plurals as euro and cent, without an s.
The 1992 Maastricht Treaty committed most members to adopt the euro once they met budget and inflation targets. Denmark negotiated an opt-out but pegs its krone to the euro through the exchange rate mechanism. Sweden, which joined the EU in 1995, rejected the currency in a 2003 referendum and avoids its obligation by simply staying out of that mechanism. Britain held an opt-out too until leaving the EU in 2020.
Beyond the member states, four microstates outside the EU, a British overseas territory and two other European countries use it, putting the total at 44 countries and territories. Until December 2002 a euro bought less than a dollar. It later traded near or above parity, touching exactly one dollar on 13 July 2022 for the first time in almost two decades.
Source: Euro
