Two UK-based organisations, Innovate Finance and Hartree, in collaboration with IBM and with the support of the UK government open a lab to research the public ledger technology behind the bitcoin digital currency. The founders hope to move the blockchain one step closer to mass adoption.
Innovate Finance is a London-based non-profit membership organisation that fosters FinTech development in the UK. The members include Barclays, HSBC, Silicon Valley Bank, Nutmeg, Transferwise, and a bitcoin start-up GoCoin. The Hartree Centre is backed with 37.5 million GBP investment from the UK government Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It presents a computing and data analysis research data obtained in association with IBM.
The Innovate Finance lab will open in October. It will leverage the power of Hartree’s high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to explore the blockchain technology. The Innovate Finance experts hope to develop new blockchain-based solutions to be adopted by financial institutions for the benefit of the market players, customers, and regulators. The first set of prototype use cases will be developed by the end of the year. The researchers will experiment with the new technologies and test the developed use cases.
Aliona Chapel