Spanish telecoms giant Telefónica plans to offer blockchain solutions to the business market. Three months ago it announced it was setting up a network for 64 Spanish business and science parks.
Yesterday, the telecoms company and UK blockchain startup Ocyan announced a commercial deal where the startup will provide the infrastructure layer for Telefónica’s TrustOS. The agreement comes in conjunction with a pre-seed investment round led by QVentures and joined by Wayra UK, Telefónica’s open innovation arm.
Ocyan provides a “cloud operating system” that deploys required infrastructure, automation, monitoring, security and data integration components to run a blockchain network. It acts as middleware, for enabling the integration of current business infrastructure with blockchain solutions. And because it sits in the middle, it supports a variety of blockchain protocols.
Ocyan’s CEO Evangelos Pappas told Ledger Insights via email that “the deployment & infrastructure engine behind TrustOS is our platform, Ocyan. Together, with Telefónica we have a joint partnership to offer a scalable enterprise blockchain solution. But we are and operate as a separate entity.”
Primarily, the OS is a combination of middleware and blockchain as a service (BaaS) offering for enterprises looking to adopt distributed ledger technology (DLT).
TrustOS aims to empower enterprises to track assets, create and manage tokens and provide a settlement infrastructure while leveraging any blockchain network they prefer. Ultimately the goal is to save enterprises the time and cost of developing their own blockchain solutions. Telefónica plans to expand the TrustOS offering with more APIs and applications for IoT, track and trace and identity, among others.
Meanwhile, Ocyan previously partnered with UK fintech ClearScore to develop a blockchain identity verification and data marketplace.
The startup is part of Wayra’s 2019 AI & Blockchain Accelerator programme, a collaboration between Wayra UK and the University of Edinburgh.
Last year, Telefónica worked with Wibson, another Wayra accelerator startup, to trial a blockchain consumer data marketplace. The telco is also working with IBM on an international mobile call billing system and is a member of the Carrier Blockchain Study Group.
