American technical giant IBM announced the creation of a SWIFT competitor – a global payment blockchain system based on the Stellar protocol.
IBM plans to present the development to representatives of banks in Sydney at the Sibos conference, organized by SWIFT in late October.
A payment solution from IBM is designed to offer banks a system of clearing and settlement of international payments, which takes no more than a few seconds to confirm transactions.
Thus, the Blockchain World Wire system can compete with the traditional Swift payment system, as well as the xRapid transaction settlement system from Ripple.
The system developed by IBM and Stellar will allow the exchange between the fiat and cryptocurrencies, including Stellar, XLM tokens.
Also, IBM has created a separate page on the Internet, which explains in detail the development concept:
“Two financial institutions transacting together agree to use a stable coin, central bank digital currency or other digital asset as the bridge asset between any two fiat currencies. The digital asset facilitates the trade and supplies important settlement instructions.”
The company also notes that the new system can allow to speed up the payment processing processes, reduce costs and increase efficiency, and also provide banks with access to new markets.
As a bridge between two fiat currencies, the system will use a stable token, IBM explains. The exchange parties will choose stablecoin, which will be used in the future to settle payments.
Previously, IBM tested the use of the Stronghold coin, attached to the US dollar and also working on the basis of Stellar, so that users of the payment system can use this token as a bridge for processing transactions.
In August, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that the European Union needed to create an interbank-independent system for the transfer of information and payments, different from the US SWIFT system, from the United States. At the same time, the German bank Bitbond already uses the Bitcoin blockchain system for international payments, instead of the SWIFT bank transfer system.
In May, it became known that the Central Bank of Russia plans to transfer the Financial Communications Transfer System (FFS) to the blockchain in 2019. In June, members of the Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACC) announced their readiness for testing a competitor SWIFT – a financial message transfer system built on a blockchain system.
At the same time, SWIFT itself is also actively exploring the use of blockchain technologies: for example, in March the interbank platform published the final results of its long-term project based on blockchain technology.
