Russian antitrust, Sberbank test blockchain-based document exchange

MOSCOW, Oct 13 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service and Sberbank, the country’s biggest bank, have started testing a Digital Ecosystem project to exchange documents based on the blockchain technology to study the potential of distributed document storage, the bank said Thursday in a statement.

“The innovation of Digital Ecosystem is that connection operators are excluded from the document turnover. The upside of the solution and lower expenses are reached thanks to the use of participants’ networks,” Stepan Kuznetsov, managing director of the distributed services department at Sberbank, said.

Andrei Tsarikovsky, deputy director of the antimonopoly authority, said expenses are cut thanks to the decentralized solution, since no data processing centers are needed and requirements to equipment booking are decreased.

The system transfers and stores documents in a cyphered form and uses an electronic signature. The project was joined by national air carrier Aeroflot, coal producer Russian Coal and oil stock refiner ForteInvest.

Blockchain is a system of distributed data base organization. It is used to keep records of all transactions with bitcoins, the most popular cryptocurrency.

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