BankChain - educational program on blockchain for banks

For the past month, representatives of the largest banks in India have been participating in online blockchain events, the purpose of which is the construction and implementation of blockchain solutions. During these events, each team receives a cloud node on a private blockchain. Each session is dedicated to a specific topic. For example, on June 7, participants considered the question of whether blockchain can be used to reduce unproductive assets, and on June 14, they will study th...

BankChain is an alliance of banks founded in February 2017, whose mission is to study and develop solutions based on blockchain. The list of participants includes 37 banks - of which 28 are Indian.

While Indian banks pay annual membership fees of Rs6 Iakh, foreign banks pay $24,000 each. According to Sudin Barokar, BankChain's chief mentor, participants receive access to the nodes and source codes of all BankChain projects, as well as access to educational materials, as well as a specially dedicated private blockchain. Previously, Barokar was the head of innovation at SBI, the first Indian bank to launch smart contract and KYC services. 

Over the past 16 months, the BankChain alliance has helped banks solve many problems such as setting up and integrating an e-KYC platform, blockchain registration, collateral and mortgages against movable, immovable and intangible assets.

“This bank could simply instantly buy these loan documents from another bank if the documents were stored on the blockchain. By providing the same set of loan documents to other banks on the blockchain with shared, banks can make money on every transfer,” explains Rojas Nagpal, chief blockchain architect at Primechain Technologies. 

According to Nagpal, the BankChain alliance is currently working on 10 projects, including work on cross-border transfers, corporate KYC, as well as a collateral registry. In addition, banks ensure that all their employees are thoroughly vetted. 

For example, Primechain-KYC records are stored in encrypted form on a private blockchain, to which only a limited number of banks have access. On a public blockchain (like Bitcoin), anyone can set up a node and join the network. On the other hand, private blockchains (like Ripple) can be described as a confidential distributed ledger system.

It appears that the main banking regulator in India sees potential in blockchain technology. In 2017, the Banking Technology Research Institute released a white paper suggesting that “banks could establish private blockchains for internal purposes.”..

The document noted, among other things: “in addition to eliminating the need to transport huge quantities of paper documents, blockchain transactions eliminate the need for financial communication between banks, and introduce new convenient and instantaneous cross-border transactions for retail customers.”