Japan's Mizuho Bank announces completion of two blockchain experiments: digital currency and record-keeping system

Japanese banking group Mizuho Bank announced today that it has completed two new blockchain trials.

Mizuho has partnered with professional services firm Cognizant to experiment with developing its own digital currency and a system that can share documents across borders.

Mizuho Bank first announced last February that it was developing a blockchain-based system for record keeping. The bank has also trialed a prototype of a syndicated loan issuance system and is a member of the R3 distributed ledger consortium.

The second trial in which Mizuho Bank is participating involves sending transactions denominated in a newly created digital currency between its subsidiaries. Mizuho explained that it is seeking to test “whether it is possible to build a business process that is as robust as a traditional centralized system at a lower cost.”

Both trials were successful, according to the bank’s statement, but it did not say whether the solutions would be developed to reach commercial scale.

Mizuho continued:

“The solution successfully demonstrated that one of the key features of blockchain technology, a tamper-proof distributed database, can be used to create an efficient platform to enable information sharing between multiple group companies, resulting in potential cost savings and enhanced usability.”

Huobi Blockchain Research Center learned that the bank said it will continue to repeatedly test the projects it has developed, especially in data storage, which is listed as the top priority for future trials.

The bank said:

“Addressing the need to store and manage large amounts of data using blockchain is the next goal of the initiative.”