The European Central Bank (ECB) announced the launch of its innovation platform for the digital euro central bank digital currency (CBDC). Seventy organizations have signed up to participate, including startups, merchants, fintechs, banks and other payment service providers.
One of the workstreams is for “Pioneers” and will focus on conditional payments, where a payment is only triggered if a condition is met, such as the arrival of a parcel. The other group involves “Visionaries”, who will explore other potential use cases with societal impact, such as financial inclusion. During the call for participants last October, the central bank also mentioned tokenization amongst the Visionary applications.
Only four of the participants are banks, one each from Austria, Cyprus, Germany and Spain, with Spain’s CaixaBank by far the largest. Two other entities, Italy’s ABI Lab and Spain’s Iberpay, have historically worked on DLT and digital euro projects in collaboration with many of their nation’s banks.
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