Akamai and Japanese financial giant Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) have announced plans to offer a new blockchain-based online payment network.
This hyper-scale payment network, powered by a newly-developed blockchain architecture, is designed to be capable of processing more than one million transactions per second at latencies of less than two seconds per transaction.
The underlying blockchain architecture is expected to be extensible to 10 million transactions per second.
Transactions executed across the payment network will be accelerated and secured by Akamai’s cloud security offerings. These capabilities are expected to help provide material cost efficiencies and security enhancements to support digital payments on a large scale.
Akamai and MUFG aim to make the new payment network available in Japan during the first half of 2020. It will provide a set of services including support for current payment processing, pay-per-use, micropayments and other developing IoT-enabled payment transactions.
“This new blockchain-based online payment system, built upon our cloud platform, will be designed to address the concerns related to scalability, latency and security that have to date hindered broader use of blockchain,” Akamai CEO and co-founder Dr. Tom Leighton said.
“Akamai and MUFG are committed to delivering innovative solutions that can better serve customers and their payment processing needs.”
“For years, the financial industry has sought to utilize blockchain to secure and hasten transaction processing and lower associated costs,” added MUFG president and group CEO Nobuyuki Hirano.
“We have high expectations for our partnership with Akamai to provide customers the ability to support significantly greater volumes of high-speed payment transactions without compromising the level of security required for payment networks.”