The goal of this exercise is to allow market participants to develop front-end prototypes that can be integrated with the back-end infrastructure developed by the Eurosystem. ECB Executive Board Member Fabio Panetta explained, in a letter to Irene Tinagli, Chair of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, European Parliament, that the documents are published to promote transparency, and in a spirit of cooperation. The documents were provided to the five companies that were selected, following the public call for expression of interest in April 2022, to carry out the experimental work:

Cover note - technical onboarding package for digital euro prototyping;
Annex 1 - technical onboarding package for front-end prototype providers;
Annex 2 - core settlement application programming interface.

The material published provides the information needed by any market participant to develop front-end prototypes compatible with the Eurosystem’s back-end infrastructure, without restricting participants’ potential to innovate.

The design of the prototype does not assume any particular choice of technology, nor does it commit the Eurosystem to providing a digital euro. The aim of the prototyping experiments is to increase the Eurosystem’s knowledge of digital euro technologies, although there are no plans to reuse the prototypes in subsequent phases of the digital euro project. The prototyping exercise is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2023. Click here to learn more about the digital euro project.