A consortium of six European nations is pushing for a new, digital, cross-border payment system which ultimately aims to combine the EU Digital Identification program with a digital euro.
The NOBID (Nordic-Baltic eID) project – which is comprised of the governments of Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Latvia and Norway – is being supported by multinational banks, large technology firms, and other government agencies from across Europe.
NOBID’s website describes the project – which sounds eerily similar the kinds of social credit system used by countries like Communist China – as the brainchild of the unelected European Commission.
“The payment use case is recognized as a key use case based on several rationales, one being the potential extension to the Digital Euro,” they claim. In its current stage, the project will likely link national bank accounts to the centralized application, and will act as intermediary between banks and merchants.