The project first began at the beginning of 2016, when Santander approached the Ether.camp team with the idea for the effort. The program shows how the bank’s customers could convert money from their real bank accounts into a tokenized online currency called Cash ETH that would be exchanged for paper currency. Therefore, a Santander customer would have three new options to coincide with their traditional bank account – tokenize, transfer or refund.
The system is set up to allow for payments of as low as USD 0.01 if the user selects to tokenize their funds. In this case, small charges may add to Santander’s earnings depending on how the user chooses to allocate the funds. The project provided an example where USD 350 in funds were withdraw to a test version of the Ethereum blockchain, with USD 1 going toward gas payments, which are needed as payment to execute transactions on the network.
The user is allotted a certain pre-set number of transactions they can execute, by paying the gas upfront. Still, this figure can be increased with additional payment.
Santander and Ether.camp are trying to engage more banks in the project, which they compared to the Universal Settlement Coin project spearheaded by UBS and also involving Santander, according to CoinDesk.
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