Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank in Taiwan has become the first bank in the country to use a blockchain payment system. The information about one of the largest privately-held Taiwanese banks introducing the system was reported recently by the local media, Taipei Times.
The announcement confirmed that the bank deploys the new technology based payment system for restaurants and merchants near the area of National Chengchi University. The information about the bank looking for the possible applications of blockchain technology in its payment networks was first passed last year. Back in March 2017, Taipei Fubon Bank made a partnership with the National Chengchi University according to which a research on key technology and engineering R&D project for blockchain payment network had to be conducted.
The system was reported to be currently running on Ethereum network. It is also implementing Istanbul Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocol, due to which, the transactions times as well as costs are measurable reduced. The bank confirmed that one transaction currently takes less than one second.
The newly-launched system also allows recording data transactions in a more improved method as each transaction is instantly recorded to blockchain after being completed. In this way merchants are able to query complete transaction records using the blockchain account book.
According to the statement released by the bank, the total volume of cooperative merchants in the area near the university has already increased by four times over the two-week period after the launch of the system. The bank also informed that the next stage for the platform will include working towards expanding the payment system to stores and businesses across Chengchi. As reported, the area will be “a demonstration zone” for the new application and will be the first step towards making it accessible for even a wider audience.
