The Monetary Authority of Singapore has announced a three-step plan to connect the world’s central banks via distributed ledger technology. The central bank said it will be a two-phase project, called Project Ubin, which will facilitate settlement of cross border transactions by global central banks in real time via a blockchain. At present, only high-value or institutionally crucial transactions are settled in real time. Project Ubin is built in partnership with banking consortium R3 and banks including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. MAS said the first phase of the six-week project was concluded in December 2016 and a paper co-authored by Deloitte was brought out highlighting the advantages of the new system. The paper explains how the system for MAS’s high-value and urgent transfers, called MEPS+, can be linked to the real-time gross settlement system (RTGS) to increase money transfer efficiency between different participant’s online wallets. Phase two of the project is now under way.
