Den Norske Bank, Norway’s largest financial services group, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the IOTA Foundation. The organizations plan to work together on new applications of the IOTA Tangle, a “third-generation” distributed ledger.
Why it is important
- DNB is the largest bank in Norway and one of the largest in Scandinavia - its capitalization stands at $238 billion. The bank has taken part in the blockchain development via the R3 consortium, and actively works with Ethereum, Hyperledger and EOS.
- Tangle is a blockchain alternative developed by IOTA. It is called a “third-generation” distributed ledger because it does not rely on mining or record transactions through blocks - transactions in Tangle pass through a network of interconnected nodes, allowing IOTA to perform operations many times faster.
Both companies are trying to explore the new digital innovation landscape made possible by IOTA’s Tangle technology.
“Norway has always been a vanguard in adopting cutting edge technological paradigm shifts that improve the efficiency of our society, I am very excited at the IOTA Foundation which is spearheading Distributed Ledger Technology and IoT payments working with Norway’s largest financial institution on carrying this tradition onwards,” - said David Sønstebø, one of IOTA’s founders.
Lasse Meholm, Head of DLT at DNB, stressed that the goals of the project are to gain a deeper understanding of the technology and find opportunities for new use cases.
Banks around the world are beginning to explore potential blockchain’s potential applications. Earlier this month, JP Morgan Chase & Co. filed a patent for a DLT-based peer-to-peer payment system, which will be used to process payments between banks in real-time, removing counterparty and settlement risks.
By Ekaterina Ulyanova