ConsenSys-backed Kaleido shares at SIBOS this week how leaders in financial services have moved past blockchain proofs of concept and pilots, and are achieving real results in production, powered by Kaleido’s blockchain business cloud.

One significant proof-point of blockchain’s viability for trade and finance is komgo, a blockchain-based commodity trade and finance network between the world’s largest banks, oil majors, traders, and certification companies. komgo achieved a significant milestone this July and August, executing a half a billion francs of commodity trade finance transactions related to shipments of crude oil from the North Sea.

komgo started with 15 core members including Citi, ING, Koch Supply & Trading, MUFG Bank, ABN Amro, Societe Generale, Credit Agricole Group, BNP Paribas, Shell and others. "We are in full acceleration,” states Souleima Baddi, komgo CEO. “It's a unique adventure to be able to transform an industry that has changed little for centuries. " By 2020, komgo anticipates to serve 50 regular customers.

Project i2i, a blockchain-based payment network spearheaded by UnionBank and others to connect rural community banks in the Philippines, successfully grew its network from 6 participating banks in 2018 to 31 financial institutions with 153 branches and 252,800 accounts. It has facilitated over 575 transactions amounting to 79.2 Php million. Importantly, the savings achieved on a single domestic remittance have been equivalent to a week’s worth of food for ‘unbanked’ families. Project i2i’s network achieved Philippines central bank approval (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas) this spring and is on pace to have over 400 rural banks and over 2,500 branches in the region onboard by next year. Further building on the i2i platform this summer, UnionBank issued its own stablecoin, PHX, pegged to the Philipino peso and backed by UnionBank reserves. UnionBank used blockchain-based tokenized fiat to successfully remit
from OCBC Bank in Singapore to an account holder at Cantilan Bank, a rural bank in Surigao Del Sur.

To accelerate these and other enterprise blockchain networks, Kaleido, in collaboration with ConsenSys and Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure, offers the only production-ready, consortium-level cross-region hybrid deployment platform that caters to diverse needs world-wide. “As enterprise blockchain deployments mature, they depend on having an easy and cost effective way to onboard new members and scale. Privacy and governance concerns are paramount for enterprise networks,” says Steve Cerveny, Founder and CEO of Kaleido.

To help support rapidly advancing blockchain business use cases, Kaleido announced last week the inclusion of advanced cryptography to provide the extra levels of privacy that clients are requesting as their networks and use cases mature. Toon Leijtens, CTO of komgo, explains, “A challenge for blockchain networks is the protection of private information on the ledger. Zero-knowledge proofs offer a potential solution for this by allowing a party to verify the accuracy of a statement without conveying the actual information in the statement.”

Today, Kaleido shares two more capabilities to advance the maturity of blockchain networks.

As networks scale, they need mechanisms that allow for larger sets of blockchain ‘validators.’ Kaleido has added the ‘rotating signers’ service as an elegant way to allow participation of more than 15 members. Business consortiums also need better ways to govern the digital smart contracts where the business logic is executed. Kaleido is launching new smart contract management capabilities that allow for auditing, controls and consortia-level visibility of the smart contracts running on the network. Organizations and developers can start the blockchain journey by exploring and running proof of concepts on Kaleido's free starter plan and add capabilities as their projects grow.