The Bank Of ENG Wants Applications A £200K CBDC Wallet Prototype

The Bank of England is seeking people who want a sample wallet for a Central Bank Digital Currency.

The central Bank has put up an ad on the UK Government’s Digital Marketplace, offering a £200,000 contract to the best bidder for a five-month project.

Key deliverables include making a mobile wallet app, a wallet and merchant website, and a back-end server to serve the mobile app and website, call the core ledger API, and store user data and transaction history.

The Wallet should have a way to sign up, change your information, and show your balance, transactions, and notifications. Other details include the ability to ask for P2P payments with an account ID or QR code and the way to pay for business transactions online.

Even though the central Bank doesn’t plan to make its Wallet, it says the project’s goal is to make the CBDC concept clear to stakeholders and to create a prototype that can be used to test the Wallet with users in the future.

It will also help the Bank with “Project Rosalind” at the BIS Innovation Hub by testing the integration of a front-end with the Rosalind API. This project is based on a model in which CBDC will be issued by a central bank and distributed through user-facing applications made by payment interface providers (PIPs), mainly from the private sector. For this model to work, a central bank’s core ledger needs to be connected to PIPs through an API, which acts as a platform.

There is a Principal Architect, a Solution Architect, a Functional Manager, a Project Analyst, and a Technical Writer on the BofE team that will work on the wallet project.

The supplier’s team is expected to do all the project work, but they will meet regularly with the CBDC technology team to discuss the project’s progress and design so that the project can be monitored and guided. The technology team will also have to put the demonstrations they make to use on the Bank’s infrastructure.