Digital Euro Project
Italy is an active participant in the Digital Euro project. For more details about Digital Euro project read here.
The European Central Bank (ECB) bears the responsibility of developing digital euros, but individual eurozone countries are also involved in advancing both retail and wholesale digital euros. In a recent paper published in 2023, the Italian Banking Association (ABI) expressed strong backing for the adoption of a digital euro. Of particular significance, ABI seeks to enable novel and innovative services with the digital euro, such as programmable payments utilizing distributed ledger technology (DLT).
Leonidas Project
The project is developed in collaboration with ABI, NTT Data, R3 and a group of banks (Banca Generali, Banca Mediolanum, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Banca Popolare di Puglia e Basilicata, Banca Popolare di Sondrio, Banco BPM, BFF Bank, BNL — Gruppo BNP Paribas, BPER Banca, Cassa Centrale Raiffeisen, Credem Banca, Crédit Agricole Italia, Gruppo Sella, ICCREA Banca, Intesa Sanpaolo, La Cassa di Ravenna with CSE, Mediobanca, UniCredit).
The project’s primary focus is to assess the advantages achievable through the adoption of a wholesale central bank digital currency on a distributed ledger technology. This aims to facilitate interbank transactions while ensuring the central bank systems meet capacity, efficiency, and robustness requirements. The objective is to pilot the use of a wholesale central bank digital currency within an application and infrastructure environment that has already experienced significant growth due to more than three years of production operation.
Specifically, the project aims to:
- Evaluate the settlement of liquid balances in mutual accounts within a distributed infrastructure using a central bank digital currency issued on the Spunta infrastructure.
- Conduct a comparative analysis with the current settlement process.
- Incorporate programmable logic into the interbank check process, including fund transfers between banks.
- Develop additional programmable logic for various scenarios beyond the checking process, such as fund exchanges between banks.
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