Commerzbank has teamed up with two chemicals companies to test a shared blockchain platform for handling bilateral supply chain processes in a live environment.
During the test, payments between the companies - Evonik and Basf - were checked, paid and booked in a fully automated and digital manner by means of a programmed payment process.
Basf and Evonik transmitted business process-relevant data to Commerzbank’s blockchain platform with the help of the data service provider Elemica. The platform then generated a complete and tamper-proof depiction of the relevant business processes as well as the data and then blockchain was used to automate payments.
For this purpose, e-money was made available to the partners for trading on the distributed ledger technology platform. Payments were processed once the transaction was automatically validated by smart contracts and through programmable money.
Heinz-Günter Lux, senior digital strategist, Evonik Digital, says: “The payment process via blockchain and by means of programmable money along our existing process chains is definitely more transparent, quicker and more reliable. It is an important building block towards the development of fully autonomous supply chains.”