NEW YORK, Sept 26 (Reuters) - U.S.-based financialinnovation start-up R3 announced on Monday that it and eightbanks, including HSBC and State Street, have successfully testeda blockchain platform powered by Intel Corp technology for bondtransactions.
The platform featured advanced smart contract technologythat enabled trading, matching, and settlement of U.S. Treasurybonds, as well as automated coupon payments and redemption, R3said in a statement.
Blockchain technology powers the digital currency bitcoin,enabling data sharing across a network of individual computers.It has gained worldwide popularity due to its perceivedusefulness in recording and keeping track of assets acrosspractically all industries.
"Our goal at R3 is to bring our members together with thestrongest technology players and work collaboratively toevaluate and accelerate this technology to production usingreal-world use cases," said Tim Grant, chief executive officerof R3's Lab and Research Center.
R3 is leading a consortium of more than 60 of the world'slargest financial institutions created to develop commercialapplications of blockchain technology for the financial servicesindustry.
The R3 consortium members involved in U.S. Treasury debtproject included CIBC, ING Bank, HSBC, Scotiabank, SocieteGenerale, State Street, UBS and UniCredit.
The blockchain trial was undertaken at R3's Lab and ResearchCenter. R3, Intel and each of the banks used physical,"non-cloud-based nodes" hosted across the U.S., Canada, Asia,Australia and Europe to interact and simulate U.S. Treasurytrading on the blockchain. (Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by Alan Crosby)