New technical tests underway at Italian interbank blockchain project ‘Spunta’, says ABI Lab

The Italian Banking Association (ABI) has provided an update on the progress made so far by Spunta Project, a blockchain-based application for interbank reconciliations.

In December 2017, ABI Lab, in collaboration with NTT Data Italia, started working on a blockchain proof-of-concept for straight-through processing of interbank reconciliations using R3’s Corda platform. In addition to NTT Data an R3, Sia is also a technical partner on the project.

“The objective is to provide greater data transparency and visibility, faster execution and the possibility of performing checks and exchanges directly within the application,” ABI said.

The project entered the test phase in October 2018 and progressed to a subsequent stage in December. It entered the “pre-production phase” in February 2019.

In its latest announcement, ABI said that new technical tests are underway to check on the robustness of the platform and progress in the process with 37 nodes, 200 banks and 200 million data items.

To that end, it said that a “simulation plan” has been launched to test overall behavior of the platform by simulating the production of transaction volumes throughout the Italian banking industry. The test covers blockchain operations associated with reconciliations from North to South.

ABI said that a data simulator has been set up that will generate transaction volumes over a period of 365 days. The data uploading and reconciliation test will be performed over a wide area that is connected through a private network.

“Sixty days’ worth of real data were successfully uploaded in the autumn amounting to 1.2 million transactions relating to 14 banks and 14 infrastructure nodes. Following the inclusion in the project of other banks, 2 million transactions were uploaded with good performance, achieving 3.28s for queries of all movements in a node,” it added.

Speaking of other areas of blockchain applications in the banking industry, ABI pointed out that the largest concentration of blockchain projects is on intrabank and interbank transfers, adding that the concentration in this field and the steps forward in the pilot phase are associated with Spunta Project. Some banks are also working to implement blockchain in the area of notarisation services, trade finance, customer identification, specified use loans and other areas.