Specifically, Worldline has delivered an offline person-to-person (P2P) payment use case that would allow individuals to perform digital euro payments even when none of the parties involved has network access. The successful presentation of the prototype aims to reinforce the technological feasibility and industrial scaling potential of the offline scenario thus contributing to a more resilient payment system.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has selected five companies to participate in the digital euro testing phase, and each company has submitted its own prototype. The ECB has released a report with insights on all 5 prototypes. The primary aim of these prototypes is to test various design choices for the digital euro and how they would integrate into the existing European payments landscape.
It’s worth noting that the prototypes will be discarded for the next phases of the project to ensure a level playing field for the industry. In essence, the experiments will further the Eurosystem’s knowledge of digital euro technologies, even though there are no plans to reuse the prototypes in subsequent phases of the digital euro project.
According to Worldline, security plays an important role in offline transactions, which is why the company’s prototype includes a hardware tamper-proof secure element embedded in a mobile phone. The end-to-end solution offers a high level of security across the entire chain of institutions and actors. The system uses cryptographic signatures to manage their specific critical financial operations linked to offline digital money.
Specifically, the system relies on a central bank component to manage the offline money supply, as well as a trusted network of intermediaries to integrate with ECB’s back-end infrastructure and manage the customer’s wallet portfolio. This method also supports funding and defunding operations while offering KYC/AML/CFT compliance.
Lastly, users receive access to a mobile wallet app that can be used to execute consecutive offline payments to peers through a proximity NFC communication channel. Effective mitigation of inherent risks and anomaly detection are secured through a regular online reconciliation of offline wallet data. To ensure market compatibility and bolster its adoption rate, Worldline designed its prototype to integrate easily with various offline solutions based on different technologies.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now