The South African Reserve Bank has published a report sharing the trial results of the DLT wholesale payment system. The project dubbed Khokha, was focused on copying interbank settlement transactions to the Ethereum-based blockchain.
“Transactions were processed within two seconds across a network of geographically distributed nodes with distributed consensus providing the requisite resilience. The SARB was able to view the detail of all the transactions to allow for regulatory oversight.”- bank's report indicates.
The official statement says that the Khokha project was created with the support of the ConsenSys development team. The main task of the Brooklyn programmers was to ensure the replication of the wholesale payment process using the Quorum platform, which is the brainchild of JPMorgan and the startup EthLab.
“The objectives of Project Khokha were thus to build on the initiatives previously undertaken by global peers and to gain further insights on DLT developments in a South African wholesale payments context. The project provided the opportunity to broaden the DLT skills base in the South African banking industry and presented an opportunity to explore the type of collaborative innovation that is expected to become more common,” the report says.
However, the management of the country's chief regulator made it clear that it is not going to take radical measures and introduce DLT technology into the national financial infrastructure. The Khokha project is more experimental in nature and does not mean the beginning of asset tokenization.
Representatives of the Central Bank of South Africa also added that at the moment, one of the priority tasks is the development of a regulatory and legal framework for cryptocurrency effective regulation, preventing money-laundering, and compliance with tax laws.
By Nadya Astam