Yesterday Sberbank, the national savings banks, announced the completion of “the first-ever pilot blockchain payment transaction in the Russian banking industry.” The transaction used the IBM Blockchain Platform on the basis of HyperLedger Fabric. Sberbank’s partners and participants in the pilot were mobile operator MegaFon and its R&D unit MegaLabs, Alfa-Bank, and IBM.
Sberbank CIB, the corporate and investment banking business of Sberbank, organized the process of transferring money, using Sberbank’s IT infrastructure to establish a uniform transaction procedure. Sberbank and Alfa-Bank hosted the nodes of the blockchain network.
“The benefit of using such technology for settlements is, above all, its high speed: after the money is sent, the transaction is recorded on the receiver’s account almost instantly,” commented Sberbank CIB Managing Director Stella Kudachkina.
Last month Sberbank announced its participation in the non-commercial alliance Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA). The bank was the first Russian bank to become a member of the alliance.
In Russia, Sberbank is part of a consortium of leading Russian banks which is developing a distributed ledger dubbed Masterchain. This ledger uses a modified ethereum protocol while complying with national security standards, according to the country’s central bank-backed FinTech Association.
