CULedger, the blockchain consortium for credit unions, plans to use the Hedera public hashgraph for cross-border payments. Two months ago CULedger unveiled MyCUID to prevent identity fraud. MyCUID uses the Sovrin identity blockchain, and the primary backbone is Swirlds, the permissioned version of Hedera.
The plan is to use Hedera in conjunction with MyCUID for cross-border consumer payments. They envision the payments to include e-commerce and real estate transactions.
About Hedera
The public DLT is currently in the process of a private placement ICO. i.e., with institutions and high net worth individuals. The platform is unusual in many ways: it’s a hashgraph, not a blockchain; it’s not open source, it uses Swirlds’ copyrighted software; it’s not entirely decentralized: the plan is for a governance council of 39 reputable global organizations from a broad range of market sectors.
There are many other differences. It’s almost anti-crypto. The intention is to distinguish itself from most cryptocurrencies. Mainly by avoiding the wild west image from the viewpoint of more conservative users.
One of the questions is whether CULedger might be one of those 39 organizations. If so, and Hedera proves successful, it stands to gain considerably.
CULedger was instrumental in putting Swirlds on the map as the first high profile client to adopt the technology. It is now the first to come out as planning to use Hedera publicly.
Payments
Most corporates prefer to use permissioned ledgers rather than public blockchains. However many of the consortia across different industries see payments as a natural application for blockchain. To date, Stellar and Ripple are the platforms of choice for payments.
Two weeks ago Santander bank introduced a payment app that uses Ripple on the backend.
“Currently, cross-border payments are painful for all parties involved,” said Rick Cranston, COO of CULedger. “They take time, they’re expensive, and there is limited visibility into the transaction. Hashgraph is fast and it provides visibility between the two parties at a significantly lower cost. ”
“Equally important for us was that any distributed ledger we build on must provide stability, so that we, our application developers, and our credit unions can feel confident in the long-term support and community of the distributed ledger we use,” continued Cranston. “This made Hedera the only choice for us.”
