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“Consider it the foundation of a corporate mainnet.”
This is how Christine Moy, head of JPMorgan’s recently renamed Liink banking network, described her aspirations for decentralization in the realm of big business.
The revamped Liink, which is based on a fork of Ethereum, is more of a “decentralized network,” Moy said, and less of a “core command product.” As such, Liink now invites its more than 400 financial institutions (including 25 of the 50 largest banks) to start building on the platform.
“Liink participants have the ability to build applications over the network and, in doing so, are able to highlight their local experience with global reach,” said Moy. “If a Liink participant has specific expertise on payments in a particular region or currency, for example, they have the opportunity to create an application and deploy it on Liink to make it available to the network.”
Read More: JPMorgan’s “JPM Coin” is live, performers say
Formerly known as the Interbank Information Network, Liink was designed to connect banks peer-to-peer and help them remove pain points from cross-border payments and other functions.
While Liink isn’t as open source as Quorum or, say, R3’s Corda network, JPMorgan encourages collaboration within the network and expands it beyond banks as well.
“The focus has been on creating a peer-to-peer network for cross-border payments, hence the original name, Interbank Information Network, but we are now also incorporating companies and fintechs into the Liink ecosystem,” Moy said.
JPM’s next step?
JPMorgan, which is famous in the blockchain world for creating the Ethereum-based Quorum network, released a flurry of news on Tuesday, the headline being that its wholesale banking digital currency JPM Coin is now available. But also that all Quorum-based services now fall under the new Onyx brand.
“Liink as a new brand comes at a crucial time as we seek to redesign the way money, information and resources move around the world,” Umar Farooq, CEO of Onyx, said in a statement.
Speaking of JPM Coin integrating the Liink network, Moy said:
“The Liink network is active for peer-to-peer information transfer. JPM Coin is obviously value transfer. As part of the larger Onyx organization, we focus on a consistent customer product experience. ”
It’s a lingering question: how could JPMorgan’s various blockchain services be combined into a greater sum than their parts? JPMorgan declined to comment further.
In addition to rebranding, Liink introduces a couple of new features: Confirmation, which allows validation of account information before initiating a payment, and Format, which helps ensure that a payment message accurately complies with country-specific requirements and of the currency.
The confirmation application matches data requesters, who seek to validate account owners and FX details, with data responders, who are incentivized to help because they can earn a reduced fee for validating that information.
“This is a blockchain-based multi-party network, so you have the option of getting a response from multiple different banks on the network, or for that matter tech companies,” Moy said. “Allowing our Liink participants to potentially create new revenue streams, we believe, is a differentiator from other offerings where a central party controls the flow.”
All in all, it looks like JPM’s Liink is shaping up to be a potential SWIFT killer.
“Liink’s original use cases were modeled by JPMorgan for banks,” Moy said. “We paid particular attention to some of the specific mechanisms of how we would design this application as a result,” he said, adding:
“The goal is not to replace SWIFT, but rather to complete it.”
