Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), a major Austrian bank, is working on a new form of national currency tokenization using blockchain technology.
RBI is extending its collaboration with fintech firm, Billon, followed by a successful test of end-to-end digitized national currency transfers.
On May 18 an announcement was made stating that RBI and Billon are working on initial stages of an RBI tokenization platform, currently dubbed as RBI Coin.
The pilot is planned to be conducted until late 2020 and is designed to speed up cross-border interbank or intercompany transactions and improve liquidity management.
If successful, the pilot is expected to launch in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries of RBI’s operation such as Belarus, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia and Ukraine, among others.
An RBI spokesperson elaborated that the bank is still discussing with its subsidiary banks in CEE to determine what banks would participate in the pilot:
“We believe the first tests would cover money transfers between Austria and an RBI subsidiary in another CEE country.”
Depending on what country is joining the pilot, RBI Coin would be pegged 1:1 to the euro or any other national currency operating in a selected country.
The RBI spokesperson person continued:
“Currencies deployed would depend on the countries involved in the pilot, so the platform could include euro and other national currencies as well.”
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Unsplash