Dutch multi-national banking giant ING has signed a five-year deal with a blockchain services firm to roll out distributed ledger tech into a range of business areas.
ING will join forces with R3 to obtain an unlimited number of licenses for its commercial (read: private permissioned) blockchain platforms Corda Enterprise platform and CorDapps.
Specifically how ING will make use of these licenses remains unclear, however it seems the bank is intent on developing usable solutions in the near future.
“We are one step closer to deploying live DLT solutions for our clients with the supported infrastructure in place,” said Head of Innovation for wholesale banking at ING, Annerie Vreugdenhil.
This isn’t the first time that ING and R3 have worked together. In 2017 ING and 12 other banks teamed up with R3 on a platform called TradeIX which is designed to streamline trade financing. Ironically, it used a distributed ledger to centralize trading documents into one place so that multiple parties could view them all at the same time.
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Perhaps the important thing to note is R3 Corda creates private distributed ledgers, rather than ‘true,’ public permissionless blockchains.
While news of corporate adoption of blockchain-like technologies might be good news for some, it’s totally opposed to why the blockchain was created. Blockchain was supposed to be a platform on which we usurped banks, it wasn’t supposed to help them streamline their processes.
It’s almost as if the banks are using the weapons of the enemy.
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