In recent time, JPMorgan had announced about its plan for a bank backed cryptocurrency, similar another big institution had for the first time tested a token to link to global payment back in 2015, and it’s worth remembering.
The project of Citigroup’s innovation lab in Dublin which was codenamed as Citicoin was never officially revealed by the bank. Citicoin aimed to simplify the processes of global payment. The Citicoin project was much similar to the JPM coin of JPMorgan.
The Citi Bank after taking stock of the experiment mentioned that; the technology can keep up to its promises; various other efficient ways can be used to enhance the Cross-border payments.
With respect to the crypto experiments, the innovation lab Chief of Citi, Gulro Atak who is the global head of innovation for treasury and trade solution spoke to CoinDesk and said, we have learned from the experiments, and on that basis we had actually determined to make a meaningful improvement to the current payment ecosystem instead of focusing fully on building Blockchain, we are deciding the regulators from across the globe, fintechs and also of adding Swift to the ecosystem.”
The project was started in July 2015, and Ken Moore of Citi’s Innovation Lab mentioned that the project has basically started as a proof of concept to see over the distributed ledger technology and was never announced officially.
Ken Moore stated that the Citi was operating three blockchain distributed ledger technologies and there was no real money used to pass through the systems. It was similar to Bitcoin mining; codenamed as ‘Citicoin’ and it was analyzing the possibilities of the technology.
Gulru Atak said that from past few years, the blockchain strategy of Citi was all about finding various ways to integrate older systems, referring to an instance Gulru said “the 2017 collaboration of banks with CitiConnect, Nasdaq which was designed to modernize payments process across private securities, they were much parallel to the Coin Project of JPM.”
However, Citi is not going to stop working on blockchain technology and will continue to explore the use of blockchain in trade finance, she added.
Atak mentioned, to change the cross-border payment network completely with blockchain enabled technology, all the world banks should be present.
Stablecoins were not used by CitiConnect, although the infrastructure that was used was very much parallel to issuing coins over the blockchain platform, Atak mentioned.
“The focus of Citi as of now is more on trade finance and trade space and credit trade letters. Citi is checking with this technology, but we are a bit reserved when it comes to making public announcements.”
We are currently at the beginning stages of the Blockchain revolution, and the banks that adapt instead of following blindly will be the front runner, and it will take a lot of time for the Banks to adopt Blockchain for practical applications.
