Akamai, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial announce blockchain-based payment network
Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), alongside Akamai Technologies, has announced a blockchain-based global payment network, expected to boost the speed of transactions and lower the cost of payments.
According to the companies, the "hyper-scale" payment network powered by blockchain claims to be capable of processing more than 1 million transactions per second, at latencies of less than two seconds per transaction.
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The underlying blockchain architecture is expected to be extensible to 10 million transactions per second, the companies assert in a statement.
"This new blockchain-based online payment system, built upon our cloud platform, will be designed to address the concerns related to scalability, latency, and security that have to date hindered broader use of blockchain," Akamai co-founder and CEO Dr Tom Leighton said.
The technology, built and deployed on the Akamai Intelligent Platform, will allow the companies to offer the new payment network in Japan during the first half of 2020.
The services available are expected to include support for current payment processing, pay-per-use, micropayments, and other developing Internet of Things-enabled payment transactions, MUFG and Akamai said.
"For years, the financial industry has sought to utilise blockchain to secure and hasten transaction processing and lower associated costs," president and group CEO of MUFG Nobuyuki Hirano said.
"We have high expectations for our partnership with Akamai to provide customers the ability to support significantly greater volumes of high-speed payment transactions without compromising the level of security required for payment networks."
MUFG inked a deal with IBM in 2016 to develop smart contracts and automate business transactions based on blockchain modelling.
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