On Friday, the Bank of England opened requests for vendors to provide a sample wallet for a central bank digital currency (CBDC). The application deadline for the £200,000 project is December 23.

The work is part of Project Rosalind, an initiative of the BIS Innovation Hub in London to develop application program interfaces (APIs) for CBDCs, with the aim of enabling interoperability of CBDCs. In other words, how a central bank’s CBDC ledger can interact with private sector payment providers.

Without sufficient integration with banks and other applications, the demand for any CBDC will likely be limited.

Therefore, a key goal of the sample wallet proof of concept is to be able to test and explore the use of the APIs and make it more tangible for user testing. The Bank could also use the work of the wallet initiative to develop rules for private sector payment schemes or wallet developers.

In addition to basic functionality, the wallet is designed to support more advanced functionality, such as payment scheduling and programmable conditional payments.

Meanwhile, on Friday Jeremy Hunt, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the Treasury planned to speed up a consultation on the potential design of a digital pound in the coming weeks. He will also publish a working paper on technology.

Separately, in September, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the five developers of initial interface prototypes in different use cases, such as peer-to-peer payments, point-of-sale payments, and e-commerce payments. The providers are Caixabank, Worldline, EPI, Nexi and Amazon. Last week, the ECB revealed more details about the prototypes.