The Central Bank of China (PBoC) received $4.7 million for its blockchain financial platform.
The news was given by the official Chinese tabloid Global Times, which found that a blockchain-based commercial financial platform, led by the People’s Bank of China, has obtained special funding for key research and development projects worth a total of 32.35 million yuan to spend over the next 3 years.
The platform was presented in September 2018 in Shenzhen and it is currently not known at what stage of development it is, despite the fact that it is already operational.
Indeed, according to Global Times, the platform has already helped to improve the efficiency of SME loan approvals, reducing the time needed to process applications from 10 days to about 20 minutes, and also reducing the cost of business financing by 6%.
Since it was launched, the number of banks and companies using it has continued to increase, reaching 44 banks and 1,898 companies by mid-January, with transactions worth over 90 billion yuan.
In addition, the project is also promoted and coordinated by the Digital Currency Research Lab of PBoC itself, the country’s major commercial banks, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and top national universities such as Tsinghua University.
By using the blockchain, the information that is recorded on the platform cannot be changed, and banks can share information with other departments. These, according to the Global Times, would be the main advantages.
According to some industry insiders, the new funding would be used for the further growth of the platform, although there is no other official information about it.
The new funding may come from the need to further facilitate access to credit and a wider range of financial instruments for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) after the end of the COVID-19 emergency.
For instance, as the independent analyst Wu Hao reveals, the objective could be to eliminate isolated areas, at the information level, so as to increase the efficiency of interbank transactions by sharing data between the various players.
