Digital euro
At the end of May 2023, the ECB published the results of a market research and prototyping project. The market research had shown that there was a sufficiently large pool of European vendors capable of developing digital euro solutions. It had also shown that different types of architectural and technological design options were available to develop a technical solution for a digital euro. The prototyping project involved the integration of five user interfaces developed by different vendors for each use case (front-end prototypes) and a settlement system designed and developed by the Eurosystem (back-end prototype). Different design options were tested to determine whether they could be technically implemented and integrated into the Eurosystem's settlement system. The tests showed that it would be possible to integrate a digital euro smoothly into the existing payment landscape, while leaving room for the market to use innovative features and technologies in the dissemination of a digital euro. The results also confirmed that, in principle, a digital euro could function both online and offline using different technical concepts. The question remains whether an offline solution that meets the Eurosystem's requirements and achieves the necessary scale can be implemented in the short to medium term using existing technology.