Taiwan Bank Launches First Blockchain Payments System in the Country

Taiwan’s private commercial bank, the Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank has reportedly launched the first blockchain-powered payments system for retail usage in the country.

According to Taipei Times’ report, the private-sector bank announced the deployment of the payment system for local restaurants and merchants on Sunday after commencing development of the platform in March 2017. Specifically, the bank is rolling out the blockchain payments system in merchant establishments and eateries near the National Chengchi University, a national research university based in the country’s capital.

During trials at the university’s own campus, the blockchain payment platform helped transaction volumes among participating merchants selling lunch-time meals to students grow four-fold.

According to a local report, the payments platform runs on the Ethereum blockchain by utilizing the Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm, enabling it to scale and drastically reduce transaction times and costs.

Adopting a Blockchain-powered system reduces transaction settlement times to less than a second on the network, and merchants will be able to verify transaction records in real-time with each transaction encrypted and recorded in an immutable distributed ledger.

The entire project took six months before the bank began integrating the system in October 2017 before going live as a payments platform around the university in recent weeks.

“The Bank will also try to explore the feasibility of enhancing the security and efficiency of payments systems using decentralized blockchain technology,” incoming governor Yang Chin-long said earlier this year while being sworn in.