CULedger announces global ledger for cross-border payments

CULedger said it will use the company’s Hedera hashgraph platform and public ledger as part of the MyCUID global identity project to build a system for identity and global payments. The idea is to help reduce the cost and complexity of making cross-border payments, it noted.

Currently, cross-border payments are painful for all parties involved, CULedger said. They take time, they’re expensive and there is limited visibility into the transaction. Hashgraph provides visibility between the two parties at lower cost. It also eliminates concerns regarding fraud and default, since transactions are recorded immutably on the public ledger, and manual processes, since transactions are automated via smart contracts.

CULedger is a credit union industry initiative for developing applications based on distributed ledger technology, which offers a protocol for financial transactions innovation. It began in 2016 as a “research to action” initiative for developing a concept for a credit union system-wide, permissioned distributed ledger platform. The organisation announced the formation of CULedger, LLC, a new CUSO, in 2017.

CULedger has already been using the private ledger version of hashgraph for general purpose, permissioned ledger use, but it is also developing what it calls a “global self-sovereign digital identity” system intended to cut the risk of cybersecurity and fraud, it noted.

Its partner platform, Hedera hashgraph, is designed to be a public, mass-adopted distributed ledger that lets developers create globally distributed applications, according to the announcement. The company believes its version of a public ledger is more efficient than a blockchain.

Commonly associated with bitcoin, a blockchain is a public and distributed ledger of executed transactions. A distributed ledger is a digital record of ownership that does not include a central administrator or central location for stored data. Proponents of blockchain technology believe it could introduce trust and transparency to any online transaction.

Shared-ledger technology creates an online system through which multiple certified parties can securely exchange information and conduct transactions with those exchanges certified by all the organisations, called nodes, participating in a permissioned network using distributed ledger technology.