At the moment, the plan is for the digital euro to be issued/"minted" by the ECB and also all transactions will be resolved by the ECB, however the ECB won't offer any sort of digital euro account or banking service, the banks will do that instead. The ECB is planning for the digital euro to be free to use for paying for private customers, free to use for donations or exchanges of money between people and free to use for online payments as well. They also want provisions specifically for poor and underbanked people.
The ECB actually seems to be at the front of central bank digital currency development. Other have just vaguely announced their interest, the ECB has actual ongoing research and prototype development with public conferences, documents and updates.
Not at al honestly, I missed like half of the races and I find MotoGP a lot more interesting. Maybe some interest will come back now that MotoGP has its big break but it's not a given. There's also not much new technical or silly stuff coming out of F1 now honestly, everyone is converging extremely fast on a couple of design and we can only wait until they get there, which might be never because Red Bull has a massive advantage. I bet that by October or so interest in F1 will be significantly lowered.
Well yes, this is about a pre-graphical design stage.