NH Nonghyup Bank, a South Korean agricultural bank, has joined the blockchain consortium led by enterprise software firm R3, Business Korea reported.

R3’s global network counts over 160 banks, financial services firms, technology companies, central banks, regulators, and trade associations. It also works with a number of central banks and regulators around the world.

With this membership, NH Nonghyup Bank plans to implement blockchain technology in its various operations to enhance their efficiency.

"We will acquire technology by joining the consortium and apply it to various sectors of NH Nonghyup Bank such as the financial and economic sectors," said an official of NH Nonghyup Bank.

"We welcome NH Nonghyup Bank to the consortium," said David Rutter, chairman of R3CEV.

R3 offers access to “Corda” an enterprise-grade distributed ledger platform for finance and commerce, working with its members to develop PoCs and move distributed ledger applications into commercial deployment. In November 2016, R3 made the platform open source, granting the global developer community universal access to its source code and launched version 2.0 last month.