Dutch central bank prepares blockchain experiment

While many so-called smart contract applications of blockchains can be replicated using existing technology, the man in charge of a series of experiments conducted by De Nederlandsche Bank says the distributed nature of blockchains could lead to entirely re-imagined financial market infrastructures (FMIs), ones that are much more difficult to hack.

Like the Bitcoin network itself, the experiment envisions how an FMIs internal operations could be distributed among participating nodes. To game the system – and break the financial market infrastructure — an attacker would need to gain more than half the computing power running the nodes.

News of the experiment, scheduled to begin later in 2016, comes as financial market infrastructures are increasingly being targeted by hackers. Earlier this month, the chairman of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) went so far as to call for immediate action on potential solutions to the issue.