Programme context and Chain4Travel’s participation
In late 2024, the European Central Bank (ECB) launched an innovation platform seeking “pioneers” and “visionaries” to collaborate on digital euro development. The programme aimed to demonstrate how conditional payments could be implemented technically, provide opportunities for participants to interact with simulated digital euro interfaces, and explore additional use cases for the digital currency. As part of their preparation phase for a potential digital euro launch, the ECB invited stakeholders including merchants, banks, payment service providers, fintech companies, and technical experts to participate in this groundbreaking initiative.
The ECB recently announced the conclusion of this experimentation, which ultimately brought together 70 partners to explore practical applications of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). We at Chain4Travel are proud to have participated as a pioneer on behalf of the Camino Network and together with some of its partners, demonstrating how CBDCs can enhance the travel industry’s payment infrastructure while reinforcing our commitment to providing diverse, programmable digital currency solutions for the travel ecosystem. This article highlights our technical achievements and provides insights for our industry’s digital future.
Understanding the digital currency ecosystem
Before I start recounting our experience, it’s worth mentioning that the tokenized money landscape operates across different layers of reach and application. At the broadest level, stablecoins operate worldwide. Within currency zones, retail CBDCs serve consumers directly. Between central banks and commercial banks, wholesale CBDCs facilitate interbank settlement. At the most granular level, tokenized deposits serve individual bank customers and potentially inter-bank transactions.
Each layer serves different purposes and offers unique advantages for various use cases. For the travel industry, with its complex international operations and multi-party settlement needs, understanding and leveraging multiple layers of this ecosystem is essential for providing comprehensive payment solutions. This ecosystem perspective guided our technical approach to digital euro integration.
Our technical approach: TravelFi, or bridging TradFi and blockchain
As a blockchain network purpose-built for travel, we brought a unique perspective to the digital euro experimentation, applying to this instance what we call “TravelFi”. Working alongside our technical partner Juice and travel industry partner InfoComm, we developed comprehensive architectural frameworks that bridge traditional banking infrastructure with blockchain innovation.
Our analysis revealed two possible, distinct integration approaches:
Pool Bridge: Optimized for regulatory compliance and operational simplicity, using shared Dedicated Cash Account (DCA) liquidity pools that enable rapid deployment without complex account management overhead. The DCA serves as a bridge account that PSPs use to manage liquidity flows between traditional banking systems and digital euro holdings—automatically resetting nightly and enabling “waterfall” mechanisms for automatic defunding when holdings exceed limits. This approach demonstrates how digital euro and blockchain can work complementarily while maintaining ECB policy alignment through automatic flow-through mechanisms, naturally supporting the current policy preference for preventing digital euro accumulation in business accounts.
Synchronized Bridge: Maximizes technical innovation and the utilization of the experimental Digital Euro Service Platform (DESP) API we were given access to, through individual wallet-holding mapping. This approach enables sophisticated conditional payment scenarios where blockchain logic orchestrates travel-specific business processes while the DESP (the ECB’s technical infrastructure for digital euro operations) handles financial execution. While this architecture could theoretically support store-of-value functionality—allowing businesses to hold digital euro balances—current ECB policy explicitly prevents such accumulation to protect traditional banking models and monetary stability.
The second architecture was successfully demonstrated through a working MVP developed with our partner Juice, showcasing real-time synchronization between blockchain wallets and DESP holdings. Users could connect their Camino’s (or any other standard) Web3 wallets, receive digital euro-backed tokens, and make purchases with instant settlement across both systems with conditional payment logic enabling delivery-vs-payment (DvP) and preventing double spending.
Our work and the architectural insights gained revealed important considerations for DESP integration:
Regulatory Alignment: The pool-based model naturally supports the ECB’s zero merchant holdings policy through DCA-mediated transfers, perfectly aligning with current policy that treats digital euro as a payment medium rather than a store of value. The synchronized model’s individual holdings approach would require policy evolution to enable the temporary balance accumulation that sophisticated B2B scenarios often demand.
System Resilience: Different approaches to disaster recovery—blockchain-as-system-of-record versus DESP-as-system-of-record—each offering distinct advantages for business continuity.
Scalability Patterns: From shared resource optimization to individual account models, each approach addresses different aspects of ecosystem growth and operational complexity.
Practical applications and industry validation
As the coalition of many travel players, Camino Network can speak with authority, and bring to institutional stakeholders as the ECB an industry-wide point of view: as a result of our experimentation, we validated the feasibility with the digital euro on the DESP of several key use cases particularly relevant to travel:
Automated Supplier Settlements: Conditional payment release based on service delivery verification
Multi-party Commission Distribution: Programmable splits among distribution partners using smart contract logic
Escrow-based Booking Systems: Payments held to implement complex cancellation rules and until service confirmation, with automatic refund processing
Real-time Analytics Integration: Providing comprehensive transaction visibility for business intelligence
Infocomm brought their GoMonaco platform as a case study and validated with us the applicability of digital euro payments to its design. Furthermore, we are in constant contact with our 230+ network participants, including major airlines like Lufthansa and travel companies like Dertour, Avra Tours, and Alpitour, and their feedback demonstrates clear industry readiness for programmable digital currency solutions that can handle complex booking, commission, and settlement scenarios.
All in all, our experimentation validated that the travel industry is prepared for sophisticated digital euro applications. The technical foundations we’ve developed position us well for whatever direction digital euro development takes. Whether focusing on streamlined compliance through pooled liquidity or maximizing conditional payment capabilities through individual holdings, we’ve demonstrated that blockchain infrastructure can enhance rather than compete with central bank digital currency systems. And as I like to say, traveltech is “a slow fintech”, as travel mirrors many characteristics of financial networks—making it an ideal testing ground for CBDC innovation.
Outcomes, and looking forward
The future looks particularly promising given the ECB Governing Council’s recent approval of a plan that will enable settling distributed ledger technology (DLT) transactions using central bank money in wholesale financial transactions. This initiative will enable DLT platforms to settle transactions in central bank money through the Eurosystem’s new Pontes framework, with pilot testing beginning by 2026.
This development creates exciting possibilities for B2B applications if similar approaches are extended to business-to-business transactions—a direction the ECB has shown genuine interest in exploring, as evidenced by initiatives like the B2B digital euro workshop held last October, where we participated representing the travel ecosystem alongside other industries. This opens pathways for the complex booking, commission, and settlement workflows that define modern travel operations.
Looking at more imminent repercussions of our work with the ECB pioneer programme, an important byproduct of our digital euro experimentation has been the development of a comprehensive blueprint for handling scenarios where we need to onboard any off-chain digital money and orchestrate it atomically with touristic transactions—for example, through our Camino Messenger infrastructure. This represents one of our current focus areas as we work to enable seamless integration of various digital currencies with travel-specific business logic.
As an example, and outside this experimentation’s scope, we’re actively developing this approach with anchor partners to enable transactions in extra-European jurisdictions, expanding the programmable payment capabilities we’ve demonstrated with digital euro to other digital currency ecosystems. Stay tuned for further announcements as these initiatives mature.
Conclusion
Camino Network remains committed to currency neutrality and practical innovation. We’re exploring multiple digital currency integration pathways—CBDCs, stablecoins, and other innovations—because our industry demands solutions that enable programmable payments while maintaining regulatory compliance. The travel industry stands ready to be a proving ground for these innovations. We’re excited to continue contributing to this evolution, supporting both European monetary policy objectives and the practical needs of businesses that move the world.
In a follow-up article, we’ll explore the broader policy implications of digital euro development, including insights from recent European Parliament discussions on monetary sovereignty, store-of-value functionality, and the strategic positioning of CBDCs in an increasingly competitive digital currency landscape.
About me: I am Mik Ruberl, VP Product at Chain4Travel, where I focus on enabling intelligent wiring of the travel industry via digital payment and identity solutions, and their exposure to agentic distribution. Get in touch if you want to speak more about how we enable digital payment for your travel use case.
About the experimentation: The technical architectures and findings described here represent experimental work conducted within the ECB’s controlled testing environment and do not constitute production-ready systems or policy recommendations.
Originally published on LinkedIn.