Taiwan Blockchain Alliance prepares to enter newly established regulatory sandbox

Rage Comment : The UK Financial Conduct Authority has created a blockchain regulatory sandbox mechanism, which has been recognized and promoted by many relevant professionals. Many surveys have found that regulatory intervention at this stage is conducive to the development of blockchain technology. Earlier this month, the Amis Blockchain Alliance, which consists of multiple financial institutions in Taiwan, also decided to join Taiwan's regulatory sandbox. The alliance's plan is to start with a single local use case and gradually expand to the global financial market.

Translation: Annie_Xu

Several financial institutions in Taiwan have formed an alliance to jointly develop blockchain services and are about to enter the newly established safe haven of Internet financial companies.

Amis Blockchain was established earlier this month and has already attracted six local financial institutions and the Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan (ITRI), with plans to develop into an international alliance.

The alliance has built a consumer-oriented peer-to-peer payment platform based on Microsoft Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) platform. Alliance CEO Alex Liu said that entering the sandbox is partly due to the commercialization plan of the proof of concept in the global market.

The Liu Alliance is currently developing blockchain services for consumers, as well as interbank products.

“We are about to enter the government’s regulatory sandbox so that we can expand the consumer base for the proof of concept.”

The alliance hopes to develop more blockchain-related opportunities in Taiwan. Current alliance members include Fubon Financial, Cathay Financial Holdings, MegaBank, KGI, Taishin, and CTBC Bank.

Initially, the alliance’s proof of concept was developed to serve employees of the alliance’s member banks, but as the alliance grows, Liu hopes the shared ledger can serve B2B products, including cross-border transactions.

Stride forward

Taiwan has gradually become part of a global plan to help promote financial technology innovation and development, committed to providing innovators with a safe testing environment without worrying about regulatory issues.

Taiwan's Financial Supervisory Commission has begun adjusting eight existing regulations to promote the development of financial products, local media reported.

The so-called “regulatory sandbox” has been renamed “Financial Innovation in Science and Technology,” which allows government agencies to terminate financial tests that may threaten the rights of financial consumers.

Alex Liu

"There are currently criminal penalties for this type of testing, so this is a big improvement compared to that," Liu said.

Collaboration with Ethereum community members

In addition to joining Taiwan’s regulatory sandbox, Liu also worked with some members of the Ethereum community to solve common problems in the implementation of applications.

On December 15, Liu met with some blockchain companies in New York, including Nuco, which is affiliated with Deloitte, in order to jointly discuss solutions to these problems.

Although there is little information available about the impromptu meeting, Liu said, "The most exciting outcome of this meeting will be continued meetings over the next month or two, which will eventually become more formal, regular meetings."

“Given the multitude of products being developed on Ethereum, we look forward to working with our North American counterparts to realize the Ethereum enterprise stack we envision.”

Localization strategy

As more and more companies collaborate to build enterprise-level products on the Ethereum blockchain, Liu believes that Amis will one day expand beyond Taiwan.

2016 was indeed an important node for blockchain alliances, with large blockchain alliances R3CEV and Hyperledger each making progress in the development of common enterprise distributed ledger solutions.

Liu believes that in the new year, the alliance strategy will start with a single local use case and develop globally.

“Unlike R3, we are starting with specific regions and smaller use cases because we believe that tightly defined use cases are easier to validate and commercialize, and then expand globally.”