BBVA and Repsol to build blockchain finance apps, BBVA issues record €325M credit line on its blockchain network – TechCrunch

Spanish banking giant BBVA has an early adopter when it comes to exploring and using blockchain in its legacy business, being the first global bank to use its blockchain network, built with distributed ledger architecture, to issue a corporate loan earlier this year. Now it is taking the next step: BBVA has inked a partnership with Repsol, the Spanish energy giant, to build blockchain-based corporate finance solutions, and as first step BBVA has transferred a credit facility of €325 million ($375 million) using its blockchain network.

BBVA says that this is the first time that distributed ledger technology has been used to issue a credit facility, and as with the loan it issued, the incentive for doing so is to reduce the time it takes to do this: the process takes “a matter of hours rather than days in a fully transparent operation that allowed the tracking and approval of the documentation involved.” It said “different types of blockchain” were used in the transfer, including a Hyperledger private blockchain network, with the signed contract registered using the Ethereum test network through a hash, a “unique document identifier that guarantees its immutability”.

“This operation is the fruit of BBVA’s pursuit of integrating innovative and disruptive financial products for corporate clients and to offer them the best solutions that meet their needs,” said Alicia Pertusa, the head of strategy and blockchain at BBVA, in a statement. The company also announced this week that it wants to extend its blockchain loan facilities and will start to test negotiating and contracting syndicated loans on the network — again, to reduce the time and steps it takes for these, which can be particularly long, given that they involve multiple parties.

Repsol and BBVA are large and very incumbent players, and the sums of money we are talking about here are, relatively speaking, small beer for them. But at the same time, they are all facing the threat of disruption from smaller and more nimble organisations, and so this could be one way of jumping into the fray of innovation to improve how they work, if not find new business opportunities altogether.

“Repsol wants to actively take part in collaborative environments. Blockchain is a disruptive technology that is here to stay and the agreement with BBVA advances our strategy of driving digitization in all areas of our activity”, said Nuria Ávalos, head of Blockchain and Digital Experimentation at Repsol, in a statement.

Repol, like BBVA, has earmarked blockchain as a technology that it wants to explore further, both for helping to run its energy business more efficiently, and to underpin the extensive financing operation that it runs around that effort.

Cool read from TC Source Link

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Google’s new Tour Creator lets students make their own VR tours – TechCrunch

Image
Google today launched a new tool for teachers and their students called Tour Creator, which allows anyone to create their own VR tour using imagery from Google’s Street View or their own 360-degree photos. The new app is designed to work with Google Cardboard and Google’s existing VR “field trips” app Expeditions . The goal with Expeditions is to let people virtually travel the world to see far off places they may never have the chance to visit in person – like Antarctica or Machu Picchu, for example. Google says that since Expeditions’ arrival in 2015, over three million students have virtually visited places around the globe. Now, the idea is to let students and teachers themselves build their own VR experiences and stories without needing technical knowledge. Instead, using Tour Creator, anyone can build an immersive 360-degree tour from their computer. To use the service, you click to get started, give the tour a name and upload a cover photo. You can then search through Go...
Read more

New malware highjacks your Windows clipboard to change crypto addresses – TechCrunch

Image
In what amounts to be an amazingly nefarious bit of malware, hackers have created an exploit that watches 2.3 million high-value crypto wallets and replaces the addresses in the Windows clipboard with an address associated with the hackers. In other words, you could paste your own wallet address – 3BYpmdzASG7S6WrpmrnzJCX3y8kduF6Kmc, for example – and the malware would subtly (or unsubtly) change it to its own private wallet. Because it happens in the clipboard most people wouldn’t notice the change between copying and pasting. Security researchers at BleepingComputer have found similar hijackers in the wild but this latest version is actively watching valuable wallets and trying grab bitcoin as they enter the accounts. Below is an example of the malware at work. The malware runs a massive, 83MB DLL file that masquerades as a Direct X service. Inside the DLL is a 2.5 million line text file full of bitcoin addresses. In the above test when cutting and pasting from an HTML page into W...
Read more

Bitcoin passes $7K bringing all 100 top coins up with it – TechCrunch

Image
Bitcoin is moving up, and it’s taking 99 of its best friends along for the ride. In the last 24 hours, every one of the top 100 coins by market cap was in the green with 84 of them posting gains of over 5 percent. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was sitting at $7,310, up 14 percent in the last 7 days and up almost 10 percent in the last 24 hours. CoinMarketCap Top 100 Bitcoin itself crossed the $7,000 mark for the first time in the last month, an indication but no sure sign that it might be shaking off a summer slump that’s seen prices plunge below $6,000 on more than one occasion. Bitcoin is quickly moving back toward early June norms around $7,500 though may meet resistance at $7,750 . In March, Bitcoin dipped below the $10,000 mark and it’s been unable to mount a rally back above that level in the months since. screenshot via CoinMarketCap They may not last, but mid-July’s gains aren’t just a Bitcoin story. Out of the top 100 coins, 24 coins made double digit gains in the l...
Read more