Singapore’s central bank has published a post-trail analysis of its blockchain endeavor that saw digital tokens of the national currency issued on a private Ethereum blockchain.
Get exclusive analysis of bitcoin and learn from our trading tutorials. Join Hacked.com for just $39 now.A newly published report by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), reveals details of ‘Project Ubin’ its blockchain effort “which places a tokenized form of the Singapore Dollar (SGD) on a distributed ledger” platform.
The project is a part of the central bank’s joint-endeavor with blockchain consortium R3, which notably launched the ‘R3 Asia Lab’ in Singapore in November. Soon after, the central bank announced the development of a blockchain proof-of-concept pilot to facilitate interbank payments. The project was Project Ubin, before it got its name.
In March this year, the MAS completed the first phase of that pilot and revealed the token powering the interbank blockchain platform – a central bank-issued digital currency. Participating banks deposited cash as collateral in exchange for these digitized dollars, with payments and transfers between member banks settled using the MAS-issued digital currency. Ultimately, the banks would swap the digital currency to cash.
Now, in its report that goes with the tagline “The future is here”, the MAS has detailed findings of Project Ubin.
http://www.mas.gov.sg/~/media/ProjectUbin/Project%20Ubin%20%20SGD%20on%20Distributed%20Ledger.pdfA technical excerpt from findings of Phase 1 of its pilot, which successfully completed the proof-of-concept (PoC) project points to:
A working interbank transfer prototype on a private Ethereum network…(and) successfully conducted end-ot-end integration between the private Ethereum network and MEPS+.
MEPS+ is the central bank operated Electronic Payment System, the national payments rail platform which enables domestic and international payments in Singapore.
A trio of major energy firms – oil giants BP and Eni along & Wien Energie, Austria’s largest energy company, have completed an energy trading pilot over a blockchain developed by Canadian firm BTL.
The ‘intense 12-week pilot, as described by BTL, involved testing an energy trading confirmation solution over BTL’s Interbit blockchain platform. As CCN reported during its launch in January 2016, the Interbit platform is a multi-chain ledger that facilitates transfers of funds and assets for remittance and data sharing.
The Interbit platform also claims to automate a number of enterprise back-office processes, including confirmations, invoice generations, settlement, audit, reporting, actualizations and regulatory compliance. Benefits include lowered costs, increased efficiency, and reduced risks.”
The pilot proved successful in all test scenarios in processes involved in an energy trade lifecycle. The next step, BTL reveals, is to bring in additional energy companies as participants for energy trading over the blockchain. The pre-production phase is to last 6 months, where the solution will run alongside energy companies’ existing trade systems. A commercial live blockchain-based energy trading solution in real-world environments is next.
Guy Halford-Thompson, BTL’s Co-Founder and CEO stated:
The interesting part here is that despite all of these steps, the minority chain can continue to operate and have value. This function is an underestimated quality of public blockchains, even by some individuals within the public blockchain space, because they miss the philosophical basis of blockchain’s creation.
Despite what some may have previously said in the blockchain’s early days, the foundations of ethereum, the currency, are not based on fringe thoughts, but on the mainstream insights of a Nobel prize winner, Friedrich August Hayek, who spent much of his life studying money. He states in The Denationalization of Money:
“The past instability of the market economy is the consequence of the exclusion of the most important regulator of the market mechanism, money, from itself being regulated by the market process… only competition in a free market can take account of all the circumstances which ought to be taken account of.”
The genius of Nakamoto was to force the creation of free market money through a decentralized mechanism, thus making a checkmate move as it can not be shut down save for by the judgement of the market. By it’s judgement alone eth lives or dies and if some parts of the market think it should split, the best-managed currency rises through market competition, or, alternatively, its mismanagement or lower quality courts the market’s punishment.
That’s just one aspect, because ethereum is not just money. It is an upgrade of money as it turns paper into pure code. Code we can modify, order around through ifs, thens, while loops. Code we can incorporate into our websites, into our videos, our games, our cars, airoplanes, trains, smartphones, fridges.
The potentials here we can not quite comprehend. So much will be automated. So much value will be exchanged with no human oversight or action. There will be deep webs of algorithms, too complicated for anyone to understand. Machines moving around on their own, based on if, thens, exchanging value based on our code orders. Cars driving themselves, automatically paying the charging station.
The efficiency gains might be higher than ever in history. Man, perhaps, will finally be freed. Yet, we pray, he is not instead fully enslaved.
There has been a rush of recent stories about how America and Britain might cut Saudi Arabia some unwarranted slack to get its vast national oil company to float in either New York or London. Both venues are vying to win a slice of a public offering that is sometimes (if hopefully) said to value Saudi Aramco at $2tn.
In New York, it seems to be a matter of overturning a law that permits relatives of those killed in the World Trade Center attacks to pursue Saudi Arabia with private lawsuits. In London, by contrast, the machinations are less about high politics than the mundane business of investor protection. They involve loosening the governance rules to shoehorn the Saudis on to the main market board.
The story has ignited fears of another regulatory race to the bottom in which investors’ interests are sacrificed in the interests of making money for intermediaries. But while that’s certainly a genuine worry, it isn’t the biggest one when it comes to Aramco’s offering. Indeed, the listing rules may be the least of investors’ concerns.
Before fretting about transparency or investor protection mechanisms in a venture where outsiders will own just 5 per cent of the equity, it is worth studying the structure of the company itself.
For all the interest in the scale of Aramco’s reserves, the business doesn’t actually own the oil in the ground like past privatisations, such as BP and Statoil. Its legal rights rest on a concession agreement originally struck in 1933 between the Saudi kingdom and Standard Oil Company of California (SoCal), which created Aramco.
This gives the company exclusive rights to exploit the nation’s oil reserves (not just those presently discovered but also any found in future) in return for royalties and taxes. As the original concessionaires discovered, when oil is the host’s main source of revenue, these rights must perforce be uncertain.
In 1950, in pursuit of more cash for his still impoverished kingdom, King Abdulaziz threatened to tear up the deal if Aramco didn’t accede to his demand for more of the upside. Faced with this prospect, the company promptly capitulated, agreeing to split its profits 50/50 with the state.
Investors in a future privatised Aramco are in an analogous (if weaker) position. Like the old concessionaires, they are dependent for returns on their relationship with Riyadh. But unlike SoCal, they have no leverage in the form of industrial know-how. Consequently their ability to exploit the company’s hydrocarbon honeypot is even more closely linked to Saudi Arabia’s prosperity than old Aramco’s was.
New Aramco’s value is umbilically tied to the dividends it generates. To bolster these and inflate the sale value, Riyadh has cut the corporate tax rate it levies from 85 per cent to just 50 per cent. This is a substantial reduction, given its continuing dependence on hydrocarbon sales for state revenue, and will put great stress on public finances already squeezed by lower oil prices.
Of course, the Saudi government can replace the lost taxes by maximising Aramco’s dividend — a position that arguably aligns its incentives with outside investors. But in a fiscal crisis, it might seek to plug the leakage of funds to shareholders by hiking taxes (all of which go to its coffers). That temptation is likely to increase, the greater the proportion of the equity it sells.
The privatisation is designed to avert such a crisis by accelerating growth through economic diversification. But getting there means navigating a path that is strewn with political uncertainty. First it will require Saudi Arabia to move to a system where oil is priced rationally in domestic markets, rather than sluiced cheaply at domestic and favoured industrial users. That will create losers whose losses will need to be mitigated.
Second it will depend on Saudi Arabia making wise investment choices. The company has established a sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, that will invest the proceeds of the IPO in non-oil assets. But as with other neighbouring wealth funds in Qatar and Kuwait, the PIF has an apparent fondness for foreign investments, pumping money into international technology businesses such as Uber and SoftBank. It is hard to see this generating many jobs or new industries at home.
More than on any transparent audit or star-studded board of non executive directors, Aramco’s success as an investment will hinge on Saudi Arabia’s ability to set sound policies and execute them smoothly. Those who buy shares will be implicitly putting their trust in princes. It is a bet worth pondering before buying shares, on whatever market they trade.