ECB Finalizes Prototypes for Digital Euro, Skeptical of Web3 Technology

The European Central Bank (ECB) has finalized prototypes for a digital euro and will decide later this year whether to develop the EU's fiat currency in this new format. The ECB believes that a potential central bank digital currency (CBDC) can boost innovation, but is skeptical about using Web3-style distributed ledger technology and smart contracts. The prototypes have been controversial due to the involvement of Amazon, but ECB Executive Board member Fabio Panetta downplayed the significance of this and stated that the prototypes were a "lab experiment" to be discarded. The ECB rejected distributed ledger technology for the back-end of the prototype, favoring a centralized model based on unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) that allows for fast and efficient validation of transactions and conditional payments without using smart contracts.

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