Central banks with first successful blockchain cross-border currency swaps

by Jane Whitmoore

The partnership between Bank of Canada and Singapore’s Monetary Authority has yielded faster, cheaper and paperless cross-border payments between institutions. The blockchain network used in the money transfer is Project Jasper – Singapore’s domestic blockchain, running under its larger brother - Project Ubin, which is a part of an affiliation with JPMorgan Chace & Co and Accenture.

“Both projects managed to continue on the work done by the entire crypto community. Such projects provide safe, fast, hassle-free payments and settlements. Projects like Jasper and Ubin helped eliminating most of the known issues with technical compliance and settlement slow-downs. Also, they proved blockchain’s maturity as a technology.”, the CFO of Singapore’s Monetary Authority stated in an official press release.

Bank of Canada and Singapore’s MA published use cases report, offering different designs and implementations of the cross-border payments and settlement system.

Bank of Canada’s Senior special director of financial technologies, Scott Hendry, stated that collaborative efforts must continue, as they are the best way for blockchain to mature even further and to be recognized as a trusted technology.

Accenture’s global blockchain lead David Treat marked the cross-border money swap “a giant leap in the modernization of cross-currency international payments.”