South African Reserve Bank Chooses ConsenSys for its Ethereum Based Project

The South African Reserve Bank selected Quorum from ConsenSys for its Project Khoka blockchain proof-of-concept to speed up development, the central bank said in a report about the initiative.

This follows a presentation from the SARB in which it detailed the success it achieved with the project in the past four months.

Project Khoka used the Ethereum-based platform that ConsenSys developed to test whether real-time gross settlements for interbank payments between financial institutions could be implemented as a distributed ledger system.

ConsenSys provided its Ethereum-based permissioned blockchain product, called Quorum, for the project.

It then connected eight banks to its network, and set up test cases to see how the distributed ledger processed transactions.

The banks were the SARB, Absa, Capitec, Discovery, Investec, FirstRand, Nedbank, and Standard Bank.

Another aim of the test was to gain a practical understanding of the technology.

No real transactions were processed, although the SARB said it made tests as realistic as possible

ConsenSys and Quorum

SARB commented on its choice of choosing ConsenSys :

“The choice of ConsenSys and Quorum was brought about through collaborative discussion with, for instance, MAS, as well as through the monitoring of what other central banks have done and collaborative learning through participation in international bodies,” 

It went on to highlight three key pillars of Quorum which were taken into consideration before choosing the technology:

1. Privacy and Transparency: Maintain required level of confidentiality with required performance level. Delivered confidentially of commercial bank transactions including private data of payment sender/receiver and full view required for central bank to perform oversight function without the central bank needing to run a centralized system to do so.
2. Performance and Throughput: Quorum has been designed to achieve realistic throughputs associated with the financial services industry. Tested to current stress load level achieving the target of 70,000 transactions over a two hour period. The actual test ran in one hour fifteen minutes.
3. Permission and Governance – Quorum supports blockchains around permissioned groups of participants, with transaction validation and block creation distributed throughout the network.

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