Tel Aviv-based blockchain startup Colu stated that it is open-sourcing banking infrastructure that is known as Bankbox. The move aims to curb technical barriers and lower the costs of central banks that are planning to issue digital currencies, as reported by CoinDesk.
The company is now overhauling its approach for its Colored Coins initiative that evolves into more blockchain-agnostic platform.
According to Mark Smargon, vice-president of blockchain and co-founder of Colu, Bankbox is a ‘business logic layer that’s capable of plugging into several different blockchains’. Also, he is envisioning a world of multiple ledgers for different use cases.
“What we decided to do is take in everything we’ve built in the back-end, open-source it and really focus – not on the ease of issuance, which is already a good tool we have – but on installing a node and running a node,” Smargon told CoinDesk.
The Bankbox allows digital currency issuers as well as custodians to issue currency, verify asset credentials, track assets and fund wallets. With this functionality, issuers and custodians can handle customer funds on an external, shared ledger that is cryptographically signed by the customer.
The open-sourcing of the protocol by Colu, comes as a part of growing industry trend which aims to increase adoption among digital currency issuers by enabling the ease of access to blockchain to traditional banking institutions.
The company also announced that Barbados-based digital asset exchange platform Bitt is deploying Bankbox for the issuance of a digital Barbadian dollar on the bitcoin blockchain by partnering with the Barbadian central bank to do so.
