Akamai and MUFG expand partnership to form blockchain-focused joint venture ‘GO-NET’

Japanese financial giant Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group is expanding its collaboration with Akamai Technologies to establish a new joint venture to offer a new blockchain-based online payment network.

The new venture, called the Global Open Network (GO-NET), aims to provide a comprehensive set of services, including support for existing payment processing functions, pay-per-use, micropayments and other developing IoT-enabled payment transactions. The objective is to enable next-generation transaction security, scale and responsiveness.

According to the official release, GO-NET is the result of over three years of close collaboration between Akamai and MUFG. Both companies will be investors in the new venture.

"This joint venture with MUFG sets the stage for a new blockchain-based online payment system that can better serve customers' and partners' payment processing needs," said Dr. Tom Leighton, CEO and co-founder of Akamai. "Akamai and MUFG are committed to delivering innovative solutions at a level of security, scale and responsiveness never before achieved."

The online payment network will be powered by Akamai's Blockchain-as-a-Service solution, which will leverage its globally distributed Intelligent Edge Platform. In addition, transactions executed on the platform will be secured and accelerated by Akamai's cloud security and performance offerings.

Akamai said that its blockchain solution is capable of processing more than one million transactions per second at under two-second latency per transaction.

MUFG, on the other hand, will provide extensive know-how of financial services and expertise in business development to bring sustainable growth and success to the joint venture.

“Our goal is to enable rapid innovation in digital payment services, leveraging a transformative platform, with built-in security, hyper-scale and efficiencies. GO-NET aims to expand the payment network business to a global scale, and enhance the services to support diverse payment ideas in the upcoming IoT era,” said Hironori Kamezawa, Group CDTO of MUFG and CEO of GO-NET.

GO-NET is expected to make the new payment network available in Japan during the first half of 2020.