European Central Bank Begins Exploring User Interfaces for Digital Euro Payments

The European Union (EU) will be moving ahead with its digital euro investigation, including exercises on how people will interact and pay with the digital coin if it is adopted.

The European Central Bank (ECB) put out a call for payment service providers, banks and various other relevant companies, with an exercise to make prototypes for user interfaces to work with the digital euro.

The chosen front-end provider companies will be a part of a pool who will work with the ECB on various issues surrounding digital euro payments going forward.

The prototyping for user interfaces will begin with an information session in June to talk about the specifics of the project.

PYMNTS wrote about the ways that many public citizens seemed to misunderstand the digital euro.

See more: Public Comments Reveal Widespread Misunderstanding About Digital Euro’s Role

The European Commission got over 11,000 comments about the digital euro, which the report notes are similar to the comments about the Salvadoran adoption of bitcoin as an official currency for that country.

The EU’s public feedback for its proposed digital coin began on April 5, and a review of the comments showed that many don’t understand the digital coin, and even more do not trust either the proposal or the government.

Those are parallel to issues Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele had.

For example, an English-language comment by one Czech Republic resident compared the digital coin technology to the sci-fi hit “The Matrix” from 1999, in which humanity had to fight machine overlords in the far future.

“I fully disagree with further digitalization/Matrixation,” the comment said, and said when it comes to currency, there’s an importance to keeping “[the] fundamental human right to be offline, which at financial market means to be able to pay cash.”

Many early comments were in German and disapproved of the tech.

This might denote a lack of explanation by the EU on how the digital euro would not replace physical cash so much as coexist with it.