ambcrypto.com
Blockchain Technology, along with the idea of digital assets, has caught the attention of several major economic institutions. According to the Wall Street Journal, 14 major financial firms, including the likes of Barclays, Nasdaq, Credit Suisse Group, Banco Santander, ING, and Lloyds Banking Group, led by UBS group AG, have decided to come together to launch a blockchain-based platform where they would utilize a “Bitcoin-like” token to settle cross-border trading across the globe.
The utility settlement coin or USC coin, has already received an investment of GBP 50 million from all the firms involved in the newly formed company, Fnality International.
Hyder Jaffrey, Head of Strategic Investment at UBS, had this to say about the development,
“You remove settlement risk, the counterparty risk, the market risk. All of those risks add up to costs and inefficiencies in the marketplace.”
The new platform is expected to take off within the next 12 months, corroborating past reports which suggested that the platform will be fully operational by 2020.
The major objective of the token will be to operate both as a payments/settlement entity and as a “messenger” that would carry all the information essential to process a trade or transaction. This should indicatively reduce the cost and time consumer per transaction, initiated on the platform.
The project comes in light of several institutions now participating in the crypto-race. Facebook and JP Morgan are the most famous institutions who are new to the race, with their native coins expected soon. However, all is not rosy for banking and other non-financial institutions in the space. ABN AMRO for instance, recently backed out of its own crypto-project.