JP Morgan helps Canada and Singapore trial bank transfers on the ‘blockchain’

Central banks in Canada and Singapore claim to have successfully completed a cross-border payment using distributed ledger technology.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced earlier today that it has successfully settled an international payment with The Bank of Canada, in what it refers to as “Project Jasper-Ubin.”

The project’s technology was developed with assistance from management consulting firm Accenture and American bank JP Morgan.

The announcement didn’t disclose the total value of the transaction.

Both banks have been experimenting with their own proprietary digital coins and distributed ledgers which they linked up using what it calls “hashed time-locked contracts,” the announcement reads.

Put otherwise, these contracts ensure all payments happen at the right time and in the correct order. In doing so, the banks claim they can clear international payments much quicker than conventional systems which require middlemen to verify the transactions.

The Bank of Canada’s Project Jasper and The Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Ubin run on privatized implementations of Corda and Quorum respectively.

News such as this will always have an air of irony about it. While banks haven’t always seen eye-to-eye with Bitcoin, they seem to be making use of its underlying distributed technology.

That said, usually the blockchain-based tech that comes out of these projects is centralized, private, and obscured from public view like JP Morgan’s JPMcoin.

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