Pioneer in the ECB's digital euro innovation platform: testing use cases against the Digital Euro Service Platform API

Challenge

The European Central Bank opened its digital euro innovation platform to market participants, the pioneers, to test conditional payments and other use cases against the Digital Euro Service Platform (DESP) API while the API was still being designed. Beelna joined as a pioneer to test its own use cases and to feed back what a payment service provider would need from the platform.

What we did

• Onboarded to the ECB’s pioneer portal and worked with the first DESP endpoints for creating and retrieving digital euro holdings, with reservations and payments following in later API releases.
• Designed use cases around transactional operations for escrow and other multi-party payments, and hashed timelock contracts (HTLC) for smart-contract style conditional payments.
• Gave the ECB structured feedback on the API design: REST for settlement and reservations, mutual TLS combined with OAuth 2.0 for production authentication, server-generated hash-based identifiers, a complete API set for digital wallet management, and a standardised cross-PSP API for transactions and reservations with inter-PSP clearing and support for conditional and reserved payments.
• Took the topic to the market: presentations on the digital euro at SmartCard 2024, together with the Croatian National Bank, and SmartCard 2025, at BUG’s F2 Future of Fintech and at the CBDC conference in Istanbul.

Results

• Hands-on experience with the DESP API and the ECB’s experimentation process, from onboarding to API feedback.
• Beelna’s positions on authentication, identifiers, wallet management and cross-PSP payments submitted into the ECB’s iterative API design.
• A digital euro practice we present at industry conferences and follow closely through the Digital Euro Association, where Alen Selimbegović is a fellow.

Source: the ECB named Beelna d.o.o. as a pioneer among almost 70 market participants in its digital euro innovation platform (press release, 5 May 2025); the full list of innovation partners is published by the ECB.