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Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and telecom giant Telstra have partnered on a “top-secret” blockchain project that aims to “add new levels of security for high-value transactions completed online,” Australian Financial Review reported.
The project partners have been reportedly working for months on the initiative. Telstra has also dedicated some of its top coders to the project.
The companies are reportedly developing an “electronic escrow” service which will leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT) to provide customers with additional guarantees when making online transactions worth thousands of dollars.
Earlier in February, Telstra, CBA and Ericsson collaborated to explore and trial 5G edge computing technologies for the financial services sector. Nikos Katinakis, Telstra’s Group Executive Networks & IT, said at the time that they will aim to “enhance existing banking applications as well as deliver new use cases such as artificial intelligence, all supported by a range of software defined networking solutions.”
It remains unclear if the blockchain project is related to this February collaboration between the companies.
CBA has been actively exploring blockchain potential in a number of areas.
Last year, the World Bank mandated CBA as the sole arranger of the first bond globally to be created, allocated, transferred and managed through its lifecycle using distributed ledger technology (DLT). In August, CBA said that it helped the World Bank launch bond-i, adding that the two-year bond has raised A$110 million.
In October, CSIRO’s Data61 and CBA started testing the potential of blockchain technology in creating smart money. They successfully completed the trial in November with 10 NDIS participants and carers in the CommBank Innovation Lab as well as a small number of medium-sized disability service providers.
