After 3 Years of Research, Netherlands Central Bank Deems Blockchain Tech Wanting

While blockchain has been hailed as a new beneficial technological advancement, it’s still too early to apply it in certain markets. And one of those could be the financial industry itself.

In a recent report released by De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Netherlands' central bank, implementing blockchain is a challenging task as the technology currently can’t keep up with the number of transactions carried out by the firm. The bank stressed that the innovation’s algorithm is yet to provide a 100 percent secure environment and noted the high energy demand it requires to perform operations, Cointelegraph reported.

This conclusion has been the result of the DNB’s three-year research on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), with blockchain being among those that they’ve extensively experimented with. To be precise, the extracted data came from the Dukaton project, whose goal was to see how to effectively leverage the technology to push the limits of the country’s financial framework.

Over the course of three years, the research team tested several validation mechanisms and consensus algorithms at each step of the development, with the first prototype utilizing the source code of Bitcoin blockchain. The research yielded results that showed the technology can indeed add protection from external threats. However, the bank would have to trade that benefit for a reduced threshold on efficiency, scalability and capacity, all three of which are vital to daily operations.

Moreover, the report stated that while blockchain tech shows a lot of promise and possibilities, the current system used by the bank proved to be able to handle large numbers of transactions and provide absolutely legal means of profit. As it stands, the bank doesn’t see why it should replace its current framework with a technology that would force it to compromise vital factors of the firm.

“The blockchain solutions tested show that they are not sufficiently efficient with regard to costs and energy consumption and they cannot handle the large numbers of transactions,” the report said. This sentiment is echoed by the president and CEO of Nasdaq Inc., Adena Friedman. She remarked, however, that blockchain still stands as a great catalyst for improvement in other markets like the supply-chain industry.