20th Anniversary of the Launch of the Euro

On 1 January 2002, the first series (ES1) of euro notes became a reality for some 300 million Europeans. The lower-value denominations contained a holographic stripe while the higher value notes carried a DOVID patch. In this article, I will take a look at how DOVIDs became the principle overt first level anti-counterfeiting device on the new currency and some of the challenges that had to be overcome to get them there.

Colour copiers

To understand why the issuing authority – the European Central Bank (ECB) – decided to put a relatively novel anti-counterfeiting device, at least in banknote security feature terms, (holograms were used on credit cards from around 1988) onto the euro – you have to go back to the first reports of colour photocopiers being used to counterfeit banknotes, which came at Interpol’s 6th International Conference on Currency Counterfeiting (Madrid, 1977 ¹).