The European Central bank has launched a call for expressions of interest in innovation partnerships for the digital euro.
Interested parties may include small and large merchants, banks, other payment service providers, fintech companies, financial institutions, research institutes, technical experts and universities.
The main goals of the partnerships are to: demonstrate how 'conditional payments' could be implemented on a technical level (i.e. between a simulated digital euro back-end and a front-end provider); provide the opportunity for participants to interact with simulated digital euro interfaces, and; explore additional use cases, ideas and visions that stakeholders may have for the digital euro.
The ECB is currently mid-way through a a two-year preparation phase aimed at laying the foundations for the potential issuance of a digital euro. As part of this, the Eurosystem is carrying out a deeper dive into technical aspects of the project.
The ECB has already run similar programmes for digital euro front-end prototyping and for offline payments.
The technical infrastructure for the latest set of test runs is expected to be available in February next year. Successful applicants will be presented with a standardised contract including data protection and IP rights and regulating promotional activities, as well as an onboarding package which will include a functional introduction for user journeys and detailed technical specifications.
The exercise is foreseen to run until May 2025, with the most promising use cases invited to an on-site event to showcase the outcome to project stakeholders.
A seperate academic exercise will invite participants to put forward theoretical work that proposes innovative use cases and explores their possible impact on communities, societal challenges and technological opportunities such as tokenisation.
The most coherent applications that fit into the digital euro framework and have innovative potential will be selected for half-day workshops with the ECB digital euro project team. The ECB says the selection may give preference to ideas that are new and challenging to the project, and will consider implementation capacity.