> An E-Cash device is any piece of secured hardware issued and/or authorised by the government for the purpose of receiving, holding, and transferring e-cash balances.

> In contrast to ledger-based systems (including those that use a blockchain and/or distributed-ledger rather than a centralized ledge), which prevent double-spending by verifying unspent balances against a common record of all previous transactions, e-cash devices verify funds locally via a dedicated or trusted computing environment located on the device itself.

> This allows it to facilitate both offline and genuine peer-to-peer transactions without generating transactional data or requiring the approval of third party intermediaries or network validator nodes.