The electronic wallet system comprises a plurality of devices interconnected through a local network and capable of conducting electronic business transactions on an open network. Each device contains a smart card reader. A plurality of smart cards represent electronic purses able to contain electronic money. One of the devices contains an entity, the server, which contains a list of data entries, each entry corresponding to a purse liable to receive electronic money, contained in tokens, from other purses of the system. The tokens transferred between purses are stored temporally by the server. In order to improve the security of the transactions, the messages which are exchanged between the devices and/or the smart cards during token transfer operations are protected by secret keys which are only stored in the smart cards of the system.