[ad_1]
Some of the biggest names in the energy sector have joined equally important banks and financial institutions to launch a blockchain energy product platform by the end of the year.
BP and Shell join the big banks for the Blockcahin project
According to reports, oil giants BP, Shell and Equinor have supported a project to support the modernization of post-trade energy processes. The announcement was presented on Monday at the Vakt Consortium at the S & P Global Platts Digital Commodities Summit in London.
The Vice President Vakt for product development, Lyon Hardgrave, said: "We expect to go live at the end of November in the North Sea oil market", before adding "In 2019 we will examine the ARA barges, markets for US water and pipelines, and by January we expect the first licensees to join, in addition to our shareholders "
The platform aims to digitize trading moving from paper contracts to smart ones on the blockchain. This will reduce costs, increase efficiency and transparency and reduce errors. Some large banks and financial operators have joined the three oil giants in supporting the project. They include IMG, ABN Amro and Société Générale, as well as Mercuria, Gunvor and Koch Supply & Trading business houses.
Up to 40% cost savings have been estimated for licensees who pay to use the platform, in addition to eliminating inaccuracies in data and accelerating the process. Hardgrave continued to clarify it;
"This is not a trading platform, nor a settlement platform – no cryptocurrency is involved, but it's all in the middle: recapitulation of the deal, confirmation, contracting, logistics (the really big element in all this ) – and billing, "
The distributed ledger will only be used to register transactions initially; however there is plenty of room for expansion. Vakt CTO, Adam Vile, added "There's a whole stack of standard technology above the blockchain – we've built a business solution with a blockchain based on it."
The expectations for the blockchain implementation are still high despite the bearish market in digital currencies this year. David Shrier of the Said Business School of the University of Oxford has opened the S & P Global Platts Digital Raw Materials Summit, stating that the entire commercial commodity ecosystem is expected to be digitized within ten years, but regulation constant would require much more time.
With the great energy coming up on board the blockchain train, probably smaller solutions for sharing energy based on the internal blockchain will follow. There are already several projects to enable greater efficiency and cost savings in the energy sector, and it will only be a matter of time before all our energy agreements are made with the distributed registers.
Image from Shutterstock
