Bank of Italy chooses Algorand for Blockchain bidding
The Bank of Italy has chosen Algorand as its public blockchain platform.
The platform, due to launch early next year, will be the first time an EU nation uses blockchain technology for banking and insurance guarantees, Algorand said in a press release on Tuesday (13 December).
“It is expected that a significant percentage of banking and insurance guarantees will leverage digital ledger technologies as part of Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP),” the release said.
The European Union allocated roughly 200 billion euros ($212.6 billion) to Italy — the most of any country — as part of its COVID-19 recovery plan.
“Blockchain is ideally suited for these types of applications given the technology’s ability to provide fast, efficient, affordable and scalable data transactions,” the release said. “More importantly, digital ledger technologies help protect against fraud – a known challenge with bank and insurance guarantees.”
PYMNTS profiled Algorand earlier this year as part of our series on blockchain, characterizing it as “an Ethereum killer, a smart contract platform that aims to provide a faster, cheaper, more secure and more scalable blockchain transaction.”
But it has several unique features that make it worth a look, we wrote, especially for payments on traditional and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects. Algorand is the brainchild of Silvio Micali, an Italian MIT professor and Turing Award-winning mathematician specializing in cryptography, secrecy, and blockchain.
Earlier this week, PYMNTS spoke with Gary A. Vecchiarelli, CFO of CleanSpark, about the future of blockchain in the real-time business-to-business (B2B) payments sphere.
“It’s an extra step when you pay with crypto,” Vecchiarelli said, “but the benefits outweigh it.”
Near-instant or real-time payments (RTP) across the blockchain cost businesses less to process compared to transferring funds. They also take much less time than waiting for ACH payments to come through.
“The transit is arguably better than the current banking system,” Vecchiarelli told PYMNTS. “I push a button and get the crypto, get the confirmation, it’s as simple as that.”
Vecchiarelli added that he envisions tools being developed to offer different payment methods across all-in-one dashboards as a normal development.
“It will be – and already is – most efficient for a company to be able to go to one dashboard and pay multiple bills using one or more methods. I am very excited to see what solutions are going to come out in the next year or two, he said.
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