The South African Central Bank, the SRBA (South African Reserve Bank) recently announced the successful implementation of their innovative payment system based on blockchain. This is a revolutionary breakthrough that could change the banking world forever.
According to SRBA, a proof-of-concept of 14 weeks was successfully completed, in
which they managed to process 70,000 transactions in just a couple of hours, with an
average of 1 to 2 transactions per second, all of them anonymously.
The report published by the SARB indicates that in this pilot test, members of a banking consortium participated, including Discovery Bank, FirstRand, Absa, Capitek, Investek, Nedbank, and the Standard Bank.
The bank announced the start of the test phase, called Khokha, in February of this year,
forming an alliance with the Ethereum startup ConsenSys. This payment platform is
built on Quorum (blockchain platform) and developed by the renowned investment bank JP Morgan.
The bank acknowledged the fact that the proof-of-concept was a success does not necessarily mean that it will replace the Real-Time Gross Settlement System
(RTGS) without carrying out further investigation and more management and regulation of the system. The SARB indicated in their report, that a large number of factors should be taken into consideration in the evaluation of this type of support systems that can be integrated into the RTGS, adding all the legal and regulatory factors, concluding that a plan fully integrated by payments based on DLT, is not a priority for the nation.
by Samuel Paz
