The Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group – also known as MUFG – decided to partner with the U.S. company Akamai Technologies, so as to develop a blockchain payment system. The goal is to reduce transaction times, without compromising the security features of the network.
Japanese Bank to Work With Blockchain Technology
Banks and financial institutions all over the world are starting to implement different blockchain systems. This is the case of this Japanese Bank that wants to improve its services and efficiency. The bank has been working during the last 18 months with Akamai, so as to design a blockchain platform that would handle 1 million transactions per second at latencies of less than 2 seconds. 
But it is surprising because in the future, the company wants to increase the amount of transactions per second 10 times, up to 10 million. Bitcoin, the most important virtual currency in the market is able to handle between 3 to 7 transactions per second.
Akamai Labs Chief Technology Officer, Andy Champagne explained that the new blockchain would facilitate micro-transactions. Nowadays IoT devices are connected to the internet and may be requesting some products for just a few cents of dollars. The example he mentions is that an intelligent washer may run out of supply and would make a small order for detergent.
At the beginning of the year, some reports said that the financial institution could be launching its own cryptocurrency pegged to the Japanese yen and would launch in 2018. Additionally, the bank is an important investor in Coinbase, the important virtual currency platform from the United States.
Banks all over the world are starting to use blockchain and cryptocurrencies. A German Bank known as Bitbond, decided to adopt Bitcoin so as to process payments and avoid using the famous SWIFT system.
Radoslav Albrecht, Bitbond founder, said about this:
“Traditional money transfers are relatively costly due to currency exchange fees, and can take up to a few days. With Bitbond, payments work independently of where customers are. Via internet it is very, very quick and fees are low.”
