The largest bank in Poland, PKO Bank Polski (PKO BP), has partnered with startup Coinfirm, a service company related to the block chain, to work together on the implementation of a data storage and verification system. documents based on blockchain technology.
This bank will use a platform called Trudatum, which has been developed by the Coinfirm team. In this regard, Maciej Ziółkowski, co-founder of Coinfirm, explained the following:
Each document registered in the blockchain (for example, proof of a transaction or the terms and conditions of the bank for a given product) will be issued in the form of an irreversible abbreviation ("hash") signed with the bank's private key. This will allow a customer to verify remotely if the files he received from a business partner or the bank are true or if an attempt was made to modify the document.
Maciej Ziółkowski
Co-founder, Coinfirm
According to the vice president of PKO BP, Adam Marciniak, for now this project is in a pilot state and at the moment there is no estimated release date. He added that they had met Coinfirm through "Let's Finish with PKO Bank Polski", an event organized so that new companies of innovative technologies, related to the financial field, become known. Similarly, he pointed out that the tests with Coinfirm started a year ago:
Last year we started testing the Trudatum platform developed by Coinfirm. As the tests in the banking environment were very satisfactory, we decided to cooperate more closely. We believe that together we will be able to carry out a pioneering operation to implement blockchain technology in the Polish banking sector.
PKO BP would be one of the first European banks that plans to use blockchain technology for the storage of documents, but it is not the only one that has focused on business opportunities related to this technology, since a month ago the Bank Frick, a bank of the Principality of Liechtenstein, announced its new service for the investment or purchase of cryptocurrencies.
In Poland, not all the voices that talk about blockchain technology and crypto-actives have a positive discourse, especially the Polish authorities. For example, just over a month ago it was reported that the Central Bank of Poland spent approximately $ 27,000 to fund a defamatory campaign with respect to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, in which negative messages were disseminated through social networks. This campaign was carried out a few months after these authorities established that they do not recognize cryptoactives as money, so it is not legal to use them in service payments or taxes.