The Bank of Lithuania has selected IBM and Tieto as the final contestants for a procurement initiative to create a regulatory sandbox platform for blockchain projects, LBChain.
LBChain forms a key element of the central bank's plans to create a national Blockchain Centre of Excellence.
The central bank issued a call for tenders for the project back in March last year and has now called on fintechs and startups to register their interest in participating in a final testing phase for the competing platforms.
“The final testing session will show which solution is most suitable for market needs," says Andrius Adamonis, LBChain project manager at the Bank of Lithuania. "We believe that the greatest advantage of LBChain is its versatility. We strive to create a platform that would not only serve for testing products or services that are already offered on the market, but would also be used to create those that might currently exist only in a financial architect’s mind."
LBChain, which operates within a Hyperledger and Corda framework, aims to offer both consultations by the Bank of Lithuania on regulation as well as technical and technological assistance by leading blockchain integrators, states Adamonis.
“It basically means that you can start your product from scratch and use LBChain to develop it into a market-ready solution,” he says.