Russian universities are ready to evaluate their blockchain-based analog to SWIFT global payment messaging network SWIFT. Russian banks have been cut off by Western sanctions. Developers claim that their system won’t allow banks or countries to be disconnected.
Russian Developers Develop SWIFT Substitutes Using Blockchain
Russian experts from the Competence Center of National Technology Initiative, St Petersburg State University announced that they plan to test a new interbank payments system as an alternative to SWIFT. The latter is now inaccessible for major Russian banks as a result of financial restrictions imposed over Moscow’s decision to invade Ukraine.
“The pilot version of the decentralized interbank financial messaging system is ready for testing and can be used in banks,” the university said in a statement. This platform was created by experts from the distributed ledgers field.
The center’s technical director Alexander Kireev said that preliminary testing showed good results. The transfer speeds currently exceed 25,000 messages per second at one node and the network’s capacity can be increased in the future.
Bits.media quoted the university as saying that the platform is capable of integrating new financial organisations and scaling them up. The university representatives stressed that the platform cannot be used to discredit any bank institution or state participant, as all clients would enjoy the same access rights as other customers.
The developers team highlighted that the distributed ledger allows cross-border transactions to be secure and reliable. After Rostec, the Russian state tech company that created SWIFT, announced in June that a blockchain-based platform would replace it. This was in response to the developers team’s announcement.
Russia has its traditional counterpart to SWIFT: the System for Transfer of Financial Messages, (SPFS). It was created amid the same tensions as the annexation of Crimea. The report states that the SPFS is already used by 70 organisations from over a dozen different countries. Rostec’s CELLS platform is also intended to enable international payments and multicurrency transactions, as well as digital currency storage.
The Russian Federation has been increasingly isolated from the global financial market, as well its currency reserves, due to its continued military intervention against Ukraine. Moscow is trying to make payments in its national currencies, with trade partners, and also looking into the possibilities of using cryptocurrency for international settlements.
What do you think Russia will do to make SWIFT more secure? Leave your comments below.
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