Central Banking Awards “Best Distributed Ledger Initiative” To ‘Khokha’ Project In South Africa

Central Banking Awards “Best Distributed Ledger Initiative” to Central Bank of South Africa

Central Banking is a forum for banking around the world, and they host the FinTech & RegTech Awards. One of their accolades, the Best Distributed Ledger Initiative, has just been awarded to South Africa’s central bank. They had a new effort called Project Khokha, which was developed with the goal of using Ethereum blockchain as their platform, handling payments and settlements between banks. The fact that they won shows that they are successful in this endeavor, using distributed ledger technology, rather than the current use of analog transaction processing.

According to the website for Central Banking, the testing shows how regulators need to work on the security and privacy of banks, along with cryptocurrency, to support the right processing. Their Project Khokha only took three months to establish, ensuring that they have the time to check out the proficiency, resilience, confidentiality, finality, and scalability for a seamless payment system. Basically, with a combination of the Quorum network from JP Morgan Chase and Istanbul Byzantine fault tolerance. They also employed the support of Pedersen range proofs.

The banks that decided to participate in this project were responsible for developing their own nodes, giving them the option of to redeem tokens with the leger. Primarily, the project focused on seeing the best way to handle transactions, while still following the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures. They also set their separate goals, involving how much time the transaction takes and how the rest of the ledger performs.

One of their goals has been to push from 70,000 transactions in a day to 200,000, as they also pushed to make it possible to compress an entire day of transactions down to two hours. According to the testing, the central bank managed to perform 95% of transactions that were down to a 1-second validation, while 99% were still able to be validated within 2 seconds. The banks maintained their privacy for the transactions, though the central bank will be able to see all of it.

By the end of the test, the company was able to keep the daily volume under their time limit and achieve all of their goals. As a final note to the industry, Central Banking noted that it is important for regulators to push ahead with innovation to protect and support the financial system.