China has numerous blockchain trade finance initiatives. Yesterday, Fan Yifei, the deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China announced that one of its initiatives has processed volumes of more than RMB 70 billion ($9.8 billion). The Bay Area Trade Finance Blockchain Platform focuses on cross border trade.
Two months ago, the transactions on the China Construction Bank blockchain network crossed the 360 billion renminbi ($50.4 billion) mark. And the CITIC / Bank of China initiative has processed more than 20 billion renminbi ($2.8 billion) on its forfeiting blockchain. Between just these three projects that amounts to $63 billion in volume.
Consider the rate of growth. In the case of the central bank’s Bay Area platform, the increase is 133% in just five months. That’s up from RMB 30 billion ($4.2 billion) in early July to RMB 70 billion now.
Putting these figures in context, global merchandise trade in 2018 was $19.67 trillion according to the WTO, and China is the world’s leading trader.
While China’s pace when it comes to blockchain seems to be outstripping the rest of the world, there are reasonably big figures elsewhere.
For example, VAKT which deals with post-trade transactions for the oil sector processes more than 90% of North Sea oil trades, and it’s expanding its coverage. While we don’t have the figures in value (we’ve asked), that has to represent billions annually.
Its sister company komgo which deals with commodities trade finance, had processed $700 million as of September. That’s from a standing start at the beginning of the year. Both of the firms use the enterprise blockchain Quorum version of Ethereum.
While massive banks and oil companies are backers of both VAKT and komgo, there’s a startup in Singapore, dltledgers, which a few months ago passed the $1 billion mark for trade finance. The Hyperledger Fabric-based platform boasts Singapore’s DBS Bank and Standard Chartered as clients.
Meanwhile, some of the most significant global projects in blockchain trade finance are yet to go into production. Marco Polo, the network with more than 25 global banks, and the Letter of Credit blockchain (formerly Voltron) with eight international banks are expecting to see the first institutions go live soon. Both are based on R3’s Corda.
And yesterday commodities trader Mercuria and investor in VAKT and komgo, revealed via Ledger Insights that its backing a $100 million venture fund for enterprise blockchain, IoT and AI to target the commodities sector.
Nobody is deploying enterprise blockchain at scale?
