The Innovation Engineering team at Royal Bank of Scotland has built a Clearing and Settlement Mechanism (CSM) based on the Ethereum distributed ledger and smart contract platform.
The project, dubbed Emerald, was setup to explore the creation of a Deferred Net Settlement (DNS) system like FasterPayments, with the aim of evaluating the technology and uncovering limitations.
In a technical paper, the bank says "Ethereum required some modifications to tune its focus from a hugely distributed, public system to a faster moving, private ledger aimed at speed and throughput."
To prove the system, the bank called in support from GFT Technologies to test the application on Google's cloud platform.
"The test results evidenced a throughput of 100 payments per second, with 6 simulated banks, and a single trip mean time of 3 seconds and maximum time of 8 seconds," states the bank. "This is the level appropriate for a national level domestic payments system."
The RBS team behind the project says the modifications and setup specifics will now be used to take the project forwards as an open source initiative.