Goldman and BNY Mellon Join Multi-Lender Blockchain Project

Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon are reportedly delving deeper into the world of blockchain transactions.

The two banks were among several firms that took part in a series of tests on a blockchain network connecting various financial institutions, one of the largest-scale of such pilots in capital markets, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (March 12).

According to the report, the so-called Canton Network was launched last year by the startup Digital Asset Holdings.

Participants made more than 350 simulated transactions on blockchain for tokenized assets, fund registry, digital cash, repo, securities lending and margin management.

“This was just the first time that we could demonstrate so many different types of applications connected together in coordinated synchronized transactions,” Eric Saraniecki, a co-founder and head of strategic initiatives at Digital Asset, told Bloomberg.

The pilot involved a range of companies, including stablecoin issuer Paxos Trust, Visa, Standard Chartered and BNP Paribas.

Down the road, “what you will see most activities is around bringing collaterals into these networks, so that you could actually move collateral 24/7 in real-time,” said Yuval Rooz, Digital Asset’s CEO and co-founder.

The report note that there has been an increased push by banks and other financial institutions to advocate for real-world use of blockchain, after a decade of experimentation and limited usage within the financial sector.

As PYMNTS wrote last month, proponents of blockchain’s underlying technical capabilities are eager to separate the technology from its associations with cryptocurrency, in “large part by finding historical opportunity areas within the traditional financial sector that digital assets were originally designed to replace.”

“After all,” that report added, “the technology’s innovative capability for storing and moving tokenized value within a digitally native landscape is worth interrogating for whatever utility it can offer as global channels of commerce increasingly movie online.”

And as noted here in October, regardless of what happens in the crypto sector, the architecture supporting those digital currencies is being steadily embraced by the mainstream and traditional financial world.

“The true intrinsic value of blockchain, which is around programmability of transactions, immutability of transactions, and the ability to do delivery versus payment and always-on types of payments, has yet to be unlocked,” Mastercard Chief Digital Officer Jorn Lambert told PYMNTS last year.