- Bank of England discusses wallet creation.
- Proof-of-Concept application goes up on Digital Marketplace.
- An intriguing collaboration between crypto and the financial sector
- This a step in the same light as The Bank of England’s collaboration for “Project Rosalind.”
The central Bank of England has a budget of nearly $255,000 that is set to go into the creation of a central bank digital currency sample wallet that could be used to perform services like transactions and payment requests.
The Bank is seeking “proof of concept” for its wallet, which will be bulky to hold central bank digital currency (CBDC). The Bank made its intentions known just before the weekend last week by posting a request for applications on the United Kingdom’s Digital Marketplace. This website was created for government organizations to solicit work for digital projects.
The Bank of England made sure to highlight the guidelines of what the proof-of-concept wallet was expected to achieve, with its utmost importance being for it to offer simple functionality services like a sign-up process, a way for details to be updated, and a way to display transactions, notifications, and account balances. A primary focus is on its ability to be loaded and unloaded with Central bank digital currency, along with a function to request peer-to-peer payments using an account ID or QR code.
The Bank also stated that it should be functional for paying for businesses online. The key highlights for the projects are the creation of a mobile app for both IOS and Android, a website for the wallet alongside a merchant website, and a backend infrastructure that’ll serve the wallet website and apps. At the same time, it also stores user data and transaction history.
The Bank stated that there has yet to be any work done on the wallet, hence their reason for putting out applications for creating a proof of concept, as the wallet will not make itself.
Some of the project’s primary aims are to explore the journey of an end-to-end user as the Bank of England seeks to sharpen functional requirements for the Bank and other private sectors. Along with creating CBDC products, it’ll be more tangible for internal and external stakeholders.
The project budget of $244,500 and around 200,000 British pounds is expected to be used for a five-month project and was approved for the creation of the proof-of-concept with the Bank of England set to evaluate five suppliers at the time. There were no applications made at the Digital marketplace.
The Bank of England once announced its intent to launch a central bank digital currency by 2030 potentially, and the sample wallet will be a start. It is also supportive of the Bank’s work as part of “Project Rosalind,” another joint experiment being carried out with the Bank of an international settlements innovation hub aimed at creating prototypes of an application programming interface for the Central bank digital currency.
The new sample proof-of-concept wallet will be test implemented using the Rosalind API.
What Is A Proof-of-Concept?
A Proof-of-Concept can be best described as an attempt to illustrate the practical potential of a concept. It is done as it is often essential to show the feasibility of a project before it is created.
A proof-of-concept prototype is often tiny but sufficient enough. The usage term came up from the development of drug studies, but other organizations and concepts have now adopted it.
An Interesting Concept.
The exciting part of creating this wallet is that it would be a step into the crypto space while the focus would mostly be on including central Bank digital currencies.
In a way, the Bank of England is stepping into the crypto market but in its path. They are, however, other banking institutions that have either welcomed crypto into its space or found a way to adopt a crypto trend. It is interesting to see how the blockchain industry continues to find its way into different aspects of the financial market.
Conclusion
Once the Proof-of-Concept prototype has been created, it’ll be easier to identify the project’s potential and how feasible it’ll be in the long run.
Now that the application has been put up on the site, the creation of the wallet has left the space of just being an idea and moved into the step of it being a possible innovation.
