Cointelegraph auf Deutsch reported on May 24 that German bank Commerzbank and steel company Thyssenkrupp have completed a pilot transaction of a forex (FX) forward on a blockchain. On Wednesday, the EUR/PLN deal worth €500,000 and with one month tenure, was initiated by Thyssenkrupp on Commerzbank’s FX live Trader platform. The transaction was directly confirmed through Corda which is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) of R3 blockchain association.

Commerzbank indicates that use of Blockchain technology supported by the Bitcoin virtual currency will be of great help in reducing delays and manual errors and will also reduce operational risks in foreign exchange transactions. Hence, eliminating the need for transaction synchronization which is stored as single unchangeable record.

It has been noted by the Head of Fixed Income at Commerzbank, Nikolaus Giesbert that blockchain is going to enable low transaction fees and secure data through a complete, unified network and error-free, fraud-proof transaction processing. Geisbert also states that significant resources are there to resolve an issue that may occur during the matching process and the use of distributed ledger technology can transform and digitalize the processes in this space as demonstrated in the deal.

Global Blockchain Pilots

Banks from around the world have recently been running Blockchain pilots for various types of transactions. Spanish Bank BBVA was the first global bank that issued a loan on the Blockchain in late April this year, cutting processing time down from days to hours.

Earlier in this week, Thailand’s fifth-largest bank by assets, Krungsri, along with Japan’s Mitsubishi Group, their banking unit MUFG bank, and the standard chartered Singapore bank conducted a cross-border payment pilot test in Bank of Thailand’s regulatory sandbox.

Argentinian Banco Masventas (BMV) had announced a partnership with blockchain-based financial services provider Bitex recently, which is going to enable clients to make use of Bitcoin as an alternative to SWIFT in cross-border transactions.

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