Japan’s biggest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, has co-developed its own blockchain to cut costs of payments and boost speed. MUFG has partnered with Akamai, a US based tech company to develop a blockchain that can process 1 million payments a second with latencies of less than 2 seconds.
The companies will continue to improve the technology and hope that the blockchain will be able to handle 10 million transactions per second in the future. For comparison, the Bitcoin blockchain is only capable of carrying out seven transactions per second with latencies of ten minutes!
The new blockchain service is built on Akamai’s cloud service called Akamai’s Intelligent platform and is “permissioned”, meaning it can only be accessed by verified computers.
The interest in blockchain has skyrocketed since 2017’s Bitcoin boom and has myriad companies interested including JPMorgan Chase, Walmart, IBM, Maersk, Daimler, Airbus and Microsoft.
Andy Champagne, CTO of Akamai Labs, the R&D wing of Akamai, has stated that the current system will only support “traditional payments”, though he does hope that in the future the blockchain will evolve to support microfinance payments and IoT payments for services like ride hailing and page long subscriptions for online publications.
