Today Japanese card company JCB said it’s working with Datachain to develop an experimental “digital currency exchange platform”. The two companies started to work together in August to explore blockchain interoperability.
Datachain was the founder of Hyperledger Labs project YUI, a blockchain interoperability project that supports communication between enterprise blockchains Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Besu and Corda. It builds on the Cosmos Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol (IBC), which relays messages between the different chains.
Various digital currency platforms are in the works, such as the collaboration between several Japanese banks participating in the Digital Currency Forum. And there’s the potential for a future central bank digital currency (CBDC). At a high level, the objective of the JCB project is to explore how to make various fiat digital currencies interchangeable without relying on a central counterparty.
The IBC protocol uses a hub structure to enable interoperability between relay chains. This avoids each chain having to communicate with every other chain. As a first step, Datachain will use YUI for interoperability between a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain and a Tendermint blockchain. Datachain has also previously worked with NTT Data to investigate interoperability.
JCB has been exploring blockchain for several years. In 2019 it developed a trial with B2B payments firm PayStand. It worked with KeyChain for machine-to-machine payments, which could be used for road tolls or 5G payments. And more recently, it partnered with LayerX to publish a joint paper on confidential computing and trusted execution environments.