Attic Lab teams with Polybius for blockchain-powered bank
Ukrainian start-up Attic Lab has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Polybius Foundation to provide the blockchain backbone for a new digital bank.
As Banking Technology reported in September last year, Attic Lab unveiled its open source blockchain platform and has been gaining some traction with banks in Europe. It will implement SmartMoney, a blockchain-based digital money system, at Bank Alliance and Alpari Bank.
In the MoU, Polybius Bank will use Attic’s OpenBankIT blockchain platform to provide payments. The bank says it is the “first European bank specialising in financial services for companies dealing with cryptocurrencies and blockchain worldwide”.
It will offer such services as credits secured by cryptocurrencies, creation of investment portfolios based on cryptocurrencies, and personal identification through blockchain.
Ivan Turygin, co-founder of Polybius Foundation, says his experience of banks’ “fear and misunderstanding of Bitcoin” led to the establishment of the bank.
CryptoPay, a cryptocurrency payments firm, HashCoins, a developer of blockchain solutions, and AmbiSafe, a developer of Ethereum smart contracts, are also involved in the bank’s foundation.
Pavel Kravchenko, co-founder of Attic, adds that the bank will be ready for the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and will offer “flexible and programmable APIs”.
The bank’s concept is similar to FinLeap and SolarisBank, who last year created the “first” global banking platform, called Solaris – a Banking as a Platform (BaaP) service.
Whilst that BaaP does not run on blockchain, Attic has built a system, and now teamed with a bank, to build a digital banking proposition across Europe.
