According to a City A.M. report, twenty companies have submitted applications to create a digital wallet for the Bank of England’s CBDC project.

Despite the remarkably short turnaround for the £200,000 five-month project, 28 applications were received, though eight did not pursue the contract bid beyond the December 16 deadline for questions. The completed applications include nine SMEs and eleven “large” companies.

The UK government will issue a consultation on the case for a central bank digital currency “in the coming weeks” on December 9.

BOE posted a request for applications for a ‘proof of concept’ CBDC wallet on the UK government’s Digital Marketplace, a service where government organisations can solicit work for digital projects.

Simple guidelines for what the proof-of-concept wallet would have to accomplish were outlined, with the wallet supposedly only needing to offer basic functionality such as a signup process, a way to update details, and a way to display balances, transactions, and notifications.

The Bank of England hopes to “explore the end-to-end user journey as a way to sharpen functional requirements for both the Bank and private sector and make the CBDC product more tangible for internal and external stakeholders.” ith its wallet development project.

The project’s key deliverables will include an Android and iOS mobile wallet app, a wallet website, a merchant website, and a back-end server for mobile and website users.

A digital pound enables consumers and businesses to automate complex and cumbersome processes and implement logic into money,” says Gilbert Verdian, founder and CEO of Quant. “Many critics cite privacy and potentially overbearing government controls as barriers to implementation. They are missing that blockchain technology makes it possible to protect the privacy of individuals, he added.

The sample wallet supports the BOE’s work as part of Project Rosalind, a joint experiment with the Bank of International Settlements Innovation Hub aimed at creating prototypes of an application programming interface (API) for a CBDC. The Rosalind API will be used to test the proof-of-concept wallet.

In September, European Central Bank (ECB) also announced the five developers of initial interface prototypes for various use cases such as peer-to-peer payments, point-of-sale payments, and e-commerce payments.