European Currency Unit opportunity for foreign diversification without reliance on the currency of a single country. The ECU was conceived on 13 March 1979 as an internal accounting unit. It had the ISO 4217 currency code XEU. On 1 January 1999, the euro (with the code EUR and symbol €) replaced the ECU, at the value €1 = 1 ECU. Unlike the ECU, the euro is a real currency, although not all member states participate (for details on euro membership see Eurozone). Two of the countries in the ECU basket of currencies, UK and Denmark, did not join the eurozone, and a third,
Romania and the euro law requires that the coat of arms of the country be used on coin designs. In Romanian, the currency is called "euro" , and its subunit "eurocent" . Romania and the euro Romania is required by its EU accession agreement to replace the current national currency, the Romanian leu, with the euro, as soon as Romania fulfills all of the six nominal euro convergence criteria. The leu is not yet part of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II), of which minimum two years of stable membership is one of the six nominal convergence criteria to comply with to qualify