The Bank of Korea has published a research report on blockchain or distributed ledger technology conducted together with IT companies, academics and financial experts, CoinDesk reported.
The Korea Payment & Settlement Association worked with Coinplug Inc on policy and technological issues from April to October 2016. According to the report, major domestic banks and the fintech practitioner of the KFTC as co-researcher as played key roles.
The research has quantitatively estimated the cost-cutting effect of the application of the blockchain technology for the first time in Korea. Substantiating it with statistics, the report said that blockchain implementation could save the bank about ₩107.7bn (16% its total costs), a figure based on previous research by Goldman Sachs.
In addition, the report recommended implementing the technology for major settlement services such as the BoK wire+ (Bank of Korea settlement system).
“In order to utilize distributed ledger technology in financial services, it is necessary to resolve technical issues such as securing trade secrets, controlling authority, maintaining trust and security, and securing scalability”, it said. “Bank of Korea assumed the situation of applying the distributed ledger technology to BOK-wire+ (Bank of Korea settlement system), considered the solutions in each process’s potential problem, and suggested specific implementation plan”.
Addressing privacy issues, according to the report, would require PKI based Key Exchange, Supernode (Central Manager) – who will have access to transaction information along with the trading partner, and Confidential Transactions which will be applicable to distributed systems and maintain anonymity and make deals with parties to access deal information.
In addition, the report also recommended the supernode to be responsible for token issuance and granting participants (or token users) access to the shared ledger. It also calls for a Merkle root-based implementation of a public blockchain capable of conducting 3,000 transactions per second.
