Amazon, an American global technology corporation, has been selected with four other businesses by the European Central Bank (ECB) to help in the development of user interfaces for a digital Euro.
Amazon, one of the most significant economic and cultural forces in the world, will assist in the development of e-commerce payment interfaces.
ECB has also formed partnerships with Caixabank and Wordline, both of which will facilitate online peer-to-peer payments. Meanwhile, Nexi and EPI have been charged with focusing on payer-initiated point-of-sale payments.
The ECB stressed that the purpose of the prototyping exercise is to assess the compatibility of digital Euro technology with company-developed prototypes.
The ECB picked all five firms from a pool of 54 service providers, choosing the greatest fit for a particular competence.
This stage, according to the financial institution, is essential to the continuing two-year “research phase” for the digital currency project, which is slated to come to completion in the first quarter of 2023, when the institution is also expected to release its findings.
ECB added that, as part of the experiment, Amazon and the other four businesses would deploy front-end prototypes that replicate transactions. These transactions will be handled by the interface and back-end infrastructure of Eurosystem.
The central bank stated that the prototypes used in this exercise with Amazon would no longer be used in future phases of the digital Euro initiative.
Serious Regarding the Digital Euro
In June of 2012, the ECB launched its digital Euro initiative. A few months later, a two-year evaluation phase concentrating on central bank digital currency (CBDC) for retail use was initiated, and the European Commission quickly disclosed intentions to introduce a digital euro bill in 2023.
The ECB might become one of the first advanced-economy central banks to have and issue a digital version of its fiat currency, given that its officials have hinted at the prospect of deployment of digital euro in the coming years.
The ECB is notoriously secretive about its conclusions about the digital Euro, but it has divulged some imprecise information, such as the projected year of implementation.
The head of the ECB, Christine Lagarde, declared in February that a digital euro would not replace currency, but rather enhance it.
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