The Italian Banking Association is to kick of a techncial feasibnility study on the use of distributed ledger technology for a future digital euro.
The initiative comes at the urging of the European Central bank for EU nations to contribute to the public policy debate around the creation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) covering the Euro-zone.
The experimentation project is divided into two work areas: one involving the infrastructure and distribution model to analyse technical feasibility, and the second focusing on programmability to experiment with use cases that can differentiate the central bank’s digital euro from the electronic payments already available.
The first work area will be carried out in collaboration with SIA, in synergy with the ABI Lab Chain banking infrastructure which already has 100 active nodes distributed throughout Italy, as well as with the banks that operate within it. So far the framework has been used for the development of an interbank reconciliation system.
The second work area will be divided into several working groups that will focus on use cases and will work in collaboration with the banks and NTT Data, PWC and Reply, which have made their resources available to the project. The initiative is open to all interested banks.