South Korea's central bank blockchain report: The new concept of "super node" integrates token issuance, privacy management, and transaction authorization (full text download)

The Bank of Korea is currently considering creating a “超级节点”（supernode） to address privacy issues raised by distributed ledger technology (DLT).

In its recently released “Present Status and Key Issues of Distributed Ledger Technology” (full text download on CoinWenKu), the Bank of Korea detailed some of the policy factors that are hindering the development of DLT.

It is worth noting that the Bank of Korea raised four major issues regarding DLT, and the authors proposed several different solutions in the “Application Plan” section of the report.

Super nodes or central managers are one of the solutions: through the supervision of privacy control, information protection of all parties involved in the blockchain can be achieved.

The Bank of Korea proposed that super nodes will also be responsible for issuing tokens and authorizing participants (token users) to enter the shared ledger, while deploying a public blockchain system based on the Merkle root that can process up to 3000笔transactions per second.

The report states:

The application of distributed ledger technology in the field of financial services first needs to solve some technical problems, such as protecting business secrets, controlling authority, ensuring feasibility and security, and ensuring scalability.

The report also mentioned that based on previous research data from Goldman Sachs, the deployment of blockchain technology can save the central bank 16% of costs, equivalent to 1077亿Korean won.

This report was jointly released by the Bank of Korea with the help of blockchain company Coinplug, some academics and financial technology experts.

The data in the report is from April 2016 to October 2016.

New impetus

The report also signals Asia's strong embrace of emerging technologies.

South Korea’s year-long debate on the future of blockchain regulation has finally culminated in a group of 27 financial firms forming a Korean blockchain alliance earlier this month, while the Korea Exchange has also created a blockchain-based private stock market.