Euro banknotes entered circulation on 23 September 2014. The full design of the Europa series 20 euro banknote was revealed on 24 February 2015, On 4 May 2016, the European Central Bank announced that the Europa series 500 euro banknote would not be released, due to fears of "facilitating the criminal activity". The old series will gradually be withdrawn. The ECB will announce "well in advance" when the old notes will lose their legal tender status. However, they will not lose their value and it will be possible to exchange them for new notes at Eurosystem central banks indefinitely. "A good design
Euro banknotes The notes also carry the acronyms of the name of the European Central Bank in five linguistic variants, covering all official languages of the EU in 2002 (the time of the banknote introduction), and now 19 out of 24 official languages of the EU28, in the following order: The order is determined by the EU country listing order, with BCE ahead of ECB because of the national precedence of Belgium's two main languages, followed by the remaining languages of Germany ("Deutschland"), Greece ("Ελλάδα/Elláda") and Finland ("Suomi"), in that order. The euro banknote initial designs were chosen from 44 proposals in