In December, the Bank of England opened applications for central bank digital currency (CBDC) wallet providers. He received 28 responses, of which only 20 were complete. Of the applicants for the £200,000 digital pound project, nine are SMEs and 11 are large companies. Five will be shortlisted tomorrow, with the winner to be decided at the end of the month after submissions.

As previously stated by the central bank, the proof-of-concept wallet is part of Project Rosalind, an initiative of the BIS Innovation Hub in London to develop application program interfaces (APIs) for CBDCs to support integration with private sector payment providers. .

The project itself is not that small because it is more than a wallet. It also includes a backend for storing transaction data, including personal data (no real data for now), which integrates with the central CBDC ledger via Rosalind’s APIs. The backend then mimics CBDC data that a bank or payment provider would store.

The central bank published the answers to a series of questions about the wallet project that revealed some more details about its direction.

India’s CBDC project introduces fixed denomination tokens. The Bank of England says the wallet should not assume fixed denominations for the digital pound.

In terms of functionality, the wallet will allow users to label and separate their funds for different purposes. Additionally, conditional payments will block funds until specific conditions are met.

These types of features show that the focus is on relevant value-added functionality, with other core functionality out of scope, such as KYC or CBDC interoperability with other types of money. Offline payments are also not in scope.

The central bank is keen to use QR codes extensively for both consumer and business wallets and technically prefers cross-platform solutions rather than bespoke iPhone or Android apps.

Meanwhile, in December, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the Treasury planned to speed up a consultation on the potential design of a digital pound that we could expect imminently.