MONEI Presents its Digital Euro Project, EURM, to the Bank of Spain's Financial Sandbox

• This project facilitates the sending of euros totally free of charge through a token linked to the euro 1:1.
• In an inflationary environment, the user's purchasing power is maintained through the 1% coupon guaranteed by top-rated Spanish Sovereign Green Bonds.
• Equivalent value is deposited in Green Bonds that invest in the fight against climate change.
• The use of Ethereum 2.0 to develop this project represents significant energy savings.

MONEI has submitted an application to the Bank of Spain's Financial Sandbox to launch its own digital euro: EURM

Madrid. November 2, 2021. MONEI, the fintech that simplifies digital payments, has submitted an application to the Bank of Spain's Financial Sandbox to launch its own digital euro: EURM. 

The financial sandbox is a controlled testing environment allowing innovative fintech-based projects to test with real users, while under the supervision and control of the authority.

This project within the Bank of Spain's controlled testing space, joins the development of the National Sustainable Finance Plan, to boost the adaptation of the financial sector to the fight against climate change. EURM facilitates the sending of euros between individuals and online payments through the creation of a token that uses the new Ethereum 2.0 blockchain technology.

Once it gets the go-ahead from the regulator (the Bank of Spain), the project will start with a pilot of 500 users, both companies and individuals, who will be allowed to issue 10 euros per participant. In this way, at most, a total of 5,000 tokens will be issued in a controlled manner. 

Each token will represent one physical euro (fiat money), the total of which will be held in two safekeeping accounts in Spanish reference financial institutions, and linked to the purchase of Green Treasury Bonds, sovereign debt with the highest rating — the highest obtained by a European sovereign issuer to date.

Consequently, EURMs can be exchanged for euros at any time. Furthermore, there will always be the same number of EURMs as euros backing them. If the token (EURM) is exchanged after one year, the effect that inflation might have will be offset by its linkage to the coupon offered by the Green Treasury Bonds, which is 1%.

The CEO and founder of MONEI, Álex Saiz Verdaguer, has remarked on the potential of this project, "We firmly believe in the enormous benefits that blockchain can bring to the everyday economy. Not only is it faster, safer, more secure, more global, and cheaper, but it also contributes to reducing environmental impact and inflation. We are confident that we will get approval soon and be able to start the first trials early next year, in collaboration with the Regulator and the Financial Supervisory Authority." 

In addition to mitigating the effects of inflation, the EURM is much more energy-efficient than the traditional euro, thanks to the use of Ethereum 2.0's new "Proof of Stake" (POS) consensus mechanism (ETH2). This new tool has the capacity to create more nodes in the network, allowing more transactions per second while reducing the cost of such transactions, to the point of being able to perform very low amount transactions, something impossible to date, and completely free of charge for the user.

Last summer, MONEI obtained the payment institution license from the Bank of Spain, after two years of intense work by the fintech team in collaboration with RocaJunyent, which also leads the legal and regulatory part of EURM.

About MONEI

MONEI is a fintech that simplifies digital payments. The company enables any business to accept multiple payment methods on Shopify and many other e-commerce platforms through a simple payments API. 

Thanks to MONEI's technology, merchants can combine more than 40 payment methods through a single platform. It currently has agreements with all Spanish banks to aggregate all entities with Shopify and other e-commerce platforms.

Alexis Damen

Alexis Damen is the Head of Content at MONEI. She loves breaking down complex topics about payments, e-commerce, and retail to help merchants succeed (with MONEI as their payments partner, of course).