Associazione Bancaria Italiana (ABI) and its ABI Lab have launched a digital euro research project.
The Italian project refers to it only as a ‘digital euro’, not a central bank digital currency (CBDC) and the Italian Banking Association does not mention any involvement from the country’s central bank, Banca di Italia, although online publication Ledger Insights requested confirmation.
The group plans to explore the technical feasibility of leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT) for a digital euro currency. The experiments will focus on two areas such as the technical infrastructure feasibility and the use cases that take advantage of the currency programmability enabled by DLT.
The ABI has a strong track record of working with blockchains. More than 100 Italian banks are in production with blockchain nodes as part of its Project Spunta, which enables automated reconciliation of interbank accounts using a blockchain solution leveraging R3’s Corda.
Much of the same team will be involved in the digital currency project, including Spunta developer NTT Data and Italian backbone provider SIA. Other participants are consulting firm PWC and technology firm Reply.
The digital currency initiative is open to any banks that wish to participate.
To learn more about this topic, CBDCs, download our ebook Central Bank Digital Currencies for Dummies – A Quick Guide into CBDCs.
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