HAW Technologies has developed a bitcoin-based lending market concept, recently presented at an event hosted by Japan’s central bank.
On 28th February, the Bank of Japan published the presentation outlining the project, developed by HAW and The Tokyo Tanshi, a major inter-dealer broker based in Japan. The goal, the startup said, was to create a kind of loan market that does away with trusted third parties.
According to HAW, the market utilizes the Open Assets Protocol – known more commonly as ‘colored coins’ – in order to signify commodified rights of redemption to a particular loan. As for the market’s structural make up, each participant is a bitcoin node, acting as lenders or creditors in the ecosystem.
Go Takahashi, HAW International’s director, told CoinDesk:
“By using assets like this, the loan is completed within the bitcoin blockchain, so you can configure DVP (Delivery Versus Payment) where rights transfer and payment of funds are done at the same time.”
HAW went on to argue that the concept shows how the bitcoin blockchain can be used to create a “borderless” loan market. Yet as currently it exists, the set-up relies on the use of intermediaries and off-chain communication, namely mediators who sit between the creditor and lender.
The mediator creates an unsigned transaction that would exchange the aforementioned assets and funds. The other parties provide signatures for the transaction, after which the mediator then broadcasts that transaction to the bitcoin blockchain for confirmation.
That said, HAW sees this changing in the long-term – particularly in light of the development of so-called ‘layer 2’ technologies around bitcoin such as Lightning, which is being built to enable the creation of bitcoin payment channels.
“There is an opinion that distributed ledger is not suitable for pre-trade in terms of processing performance,” Takahashi said. “However, it is based on the existence of intermediaries, we believe that the distributed ledger may be compatible in decentralized market. We would like to advance the research with the view of layer 2 technology as well.”
Lending money image via Shutterstock