The ECB has opened applications for two sets of participants for digital euro trials. “Pioneer” partners will test conditional payments in a central bank digital currency (CBDC) simulation starting in February 2025 lasting four months. “Visionary” partners will explore innovative use case at a theoretical level including potential tokenization use cases. Visionaries will also investigate the social impact of their use cases. Applications are open until November 29 and the ECB will not pay for participation.
Stepping back, the digital euro is now one year into its two year preparation phase. In January it published a vendor call for €1.1 billion worth of contracts. The CBDC is intended as a pan European payment system, with the goal of reducing the reliance of retail payment systems on non-EU providers such as Visa and Mastercard. The ECB has not yet made a final decision to launch a digital euro and enabling legislation is required.
For this call for participants, the ECB envisages working with most organizations that meet the formal requirements. In the case of conditional payments, the example provided was the pre-authorization of an ecommerce payment for a short stay apartment, with the final payment happening at the end of the stay.
A key goal is to enable payment providers and merchants experiment with the simulated system.
For the more academic ‘visionary’ exercise, the ECB plans to invite some of the visionaries to workshops likely starting in February. “The selection may give preference to ideas that are new and challenging to the project, and will consider implementation capacity.”
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