30 Spanish banks in conjunction with Bizium, Iberpay, and Redsys – all payment solution providers or systems – have agreed to launch a brand new set of proof-of-concept trials for the issuance of a digital euro by the European Central Bank.
The crucial trials are expected to launch in 2023, and aim, mainly, to understand how a potential digital euro can exists within the payment ecosystem status quo. Further goals are the understanding of the business, technical and operational aspects of a digital euro.
The new trials will test the uses of the digital euro in various controlled environments. The main actor will be the ECB, as all these isolated settings will be in accordance to their proposals.
The project will start testing for point-of-sell, e-commerce, and peer-to-peer online and offline payments. Propositions about applying ceilings to the total amount of holdings allowed will be discussed, and to the potential uses of the digital euro as both an offline and an online payment method.
This project is actually a part of the European Central Bank’s two year long digital euro enquiry project, and is set for early 2023. It comes a year after the Bank of Spain plus 16 Spanish banks, in collaboration with Iberpay, conducted the first proof-of-concept trials.
