Recently, a number of global banking institutions have stepped up measures to test blockchain systems at their end that provides customers the service of faster transactions at reduced costs.
In a recent move, Canada’s TD Bank has applied for a patent which describes the use of public blockchain system for digitally tracking assets. The patent filing further talks the use of public distributed ledger in order to help the point-of-sale computers track transactions. In this process, computers create their own blocks of data that store information like assets being sold, their value in a given currency, and the transactions themselves.
The bank considers the use of public blockchain network wherein the individuals who are running it can successfully approve the transactions. While praising the blockchain technology, the patent filing notes: “One advantage of block chain [sic] based ledgers is the public nature of the block chain architecture that allows anyone in the public to review the content of the ledger and verify ownership. The decentralized block chain approach also makes the system fairly robust in comparison to centralized server systems by allowing multiple distributed networks to verify the contents of a single ledger. This allows for redundancy and minimizes risk of falsification of ledgers.”
However, note that the bank filed the patent back in September 2016, and it remains unclear what progress it has made since then. But it is good to see that more and more banks are joining the blockchain space. Recently, thecoingraph reported how the Bank of England is testing a proof-of-concept to integrate its new RTGS system with the Blockchain technology.