On Friday the Bank of England opened applications for suppliers to provide a sample wallet for a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The application deadline for the £200,000 project is 23 December.
The work is part of Project Rosalind, an initiative of the BIS Innovation Hub in London to develop application program interfaces (APIs) for CBDC, aiming to enable interoperability for CBDCs. In other words, how a central bank’s central CBDC ledger can interface with private sector payment providers.
Without sufficient integration with banks and other applications, the demand for any CBDC will likely be limited.
Hence a key aim of the sample wallet proof of concept is to be able to test and explore the use of APIs and make it more tangible for user testing. The Bank might also use the work from the wallet initiative to develop rules for payment schemes or private sector wallet developers.
In addition to basic functionality, the wallet is intended to support more advanced functionality, such as payment scheduling and programmable conditional payments.
Meanwhile, on Friday Jeremy Hunt, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the Treasury planned to accelerate a consultation on the potential design for a digital pound in the coming weeks. It will also be releasing a Technology Working Paper.
Elsewhere, in September the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the five developers of initial interface prototypes across different use cases such as peer to peer payments, point of sale payments and e-commerce payments. The suppliers are Caixabank, Worldline, EPI, Nexi and Amazon. Last week the ECB revealed more details about the prototypes.
