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The industry consortium led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and The Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) has released the report and source-codes on distributed ledger prototypes for inter-bank payments.
2 The report1: ‘Re-imagining Interbank Real-Time Gross Settlement Systems Using Distributed Ledger Technology’ describes the prototypes developed on three Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platforms (Corda, Hyperledger Fabric and Quorum) and shares the findings and observations from the project.
3 The source-codes and technical documentation of the three successful DLT based prototypes developed in Project Ubin Phase 22 have also been released for public access3 under Apache License Version 2.0. Central banks, financial institutions, as well as academic and research institutions can now tap on the open source-codes to facilitate their experiments, research and innovation. Academics can use the available resources to perform additional research on areas relating to DLT (e.g. scalability, performance, LSM algorithm optimisation). Financial Institutions can reference the privacy-preservation models for internal projects. In addition, the resources enable central banks to reuse the prototypes to conduct internal trials on domestic inter-bank payments.
4 Phase 2 of Project Ubin was conducted together with 11 financial institutions and five technology companies4. The successful development of three software prototypes models for decentralised inter-bank payment and settlements with liquidity savings mechanisms was announced on 5 October 20175 in a joint release by MAS and ABS.
5 MAS will further leverage the collective knowledge of the open-source community though the Linux Foundation and the Hyperledger Project6 and encourage both institutions and individuals to contribute and improve on the prototypes.
6 Sopnendu Mohanty, Chief FinTech Officer, MAS, said, “Open-sourcing these prototypes will encourage other central banks to conduct similar trials and engender further development on domestic inter-bank payments. We aim to link up such DLT-based systems in the future for improved cross-border connectivity. This is our contribution to the global financial ecosystem, and a step towards developing cheaper, safer and more efficient cross-border payments.”
7 Ong-Ang Ai Boon, Director of ABS, said, “Project Ubin has brought the banks together in experimenting with DLT in a collaborative, and multidisciplinary manner. We see immense benefits from such industry partnership that creates a vibrant ecosystem. We are also encouraged that the fruits of our project can be shared with other central banks and players in the financial industry to catalyse more innovations.”
1 The report can be downloaded at: http://bit.ly/ubin2017rpt
2 For more details on Project Ubin, please refer to our website: http://www.mas.gov.sg/Singapore-Financial-Centre/Smart-Financial-Centre/Project-Ubin.aspx .
3 http://bit.ly/ubin2017codes
4 The participating financial institutions are Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Credit Suisse, DBS Bank Ltd, HSBC Limited, J.P. Morgan, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, OCBC Bank, Singapore Exchange, Standard Chartered Bank, and United Overseas Bank. Accenture was appointed to manage and develop the prototypes. R3, IBM, and ConsenSys were engaged to provide support on the respective DLT platforms of Corda, Hyperledger Fabric and Quorum. Microsoft was engaged to support the deployment of the prototypes on Azure Blockchain.
5 http://www.mas.gov.sg/News-and-Publications/Media-Releases/2017/MAS-and-ABS-lead-consortium-to-harness-blockchain-technology.aspx
6 MAS is an Associate Member of Hyperledger, hosted by The Linux Foundation, since 3 November 2017.
