On Monday 5 May, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced that Quant, alongside almost 70 market participants – including merchants, fintech companies, start-ups, banks and other payment service providers – has been selected to work on the ECB’s Digital Euro project as a pioneer partner. We will play a key role in helping the ECB to develop a secure, trusted and private digital euro, with the programmability and efficiency of modern digital payments.
In November 2023, the ECB began laying the foundations for the issuance of a digital Euro. Fast forward to today, the project is entering a new phase which focuses on creating an innovation platform to collaborate and test new use cases with various stakeholders across the ecosystem.
We are honoured to have been selected, and as leaders in distributed ledger technology, programmability and interoperability, we have the technical expertise, strategic insight and extensive institutional experience to deliver a programmable payment use case as part of the ECB’s wider vision for a digital euro.
Over the last five years, we have built a strong portfolio of deep industry expertise in secure payments infrastructure, orchestration and interoperability of DLT and non-DLT payment rails, settlement of all forms of money including tokenised money, commercial bank deposits and settlement systems in distributed, centralised and unified ledger models.
All of which were utilised in the successful delivery of projects including UK’s Regulated Liability Network (RLN) and the BIS & Bank of England’s Project Rosalind retail CBDC. These initiatives highlight our ability to deliver innovative, secure, and compliant technology that supports fiat and digital payments for central and commercial banking institutions both nationally and cross-border.
Quant’s pioneer role will focus on embedding our programmability capabilities, testing conditional payments with the ECB and embedding programmability at the wallet layer. Using our existing programmable payments technology linked to the ECB’s Digital Euro Service Platform, we will enable conditional payments in the digital Euro in a P2P marketplace use case.
As part of this we will implement our multi-party lock technology, demonstrating how we can enable secure transactions by pre-authorising and locking funds until specific conditions, such as delivery of goods in this case, are met. Once verified, payments can then be seamlessly transferred, ensuring smooth and risk-mitigated transaction flows.
“We’re delighted to be part of such a visionary project that leverages our patented technology and tried and tested capabilities to showcase how the digital Euro can enable seamless and secure P2P transactions in real world scenarios. I look forward to witnessing how our contribution enables the financial infrastructure of the future benefiting entire markets, businesses and consumers with new programmable digital money,” Gilbert Verdian, Founder and CEO.
