Medium announced that it signed a business agreement with PeerSafe, which is a leading company in blockchain solution from China, in order to expand China Banking Association’s CTFU (China Trade Finance Union blockchain platform) as a Korea-China trade finance transaction platform.
The signing took place online at their headquarters and it involved CEO Kim Pan-jong of Medium, CEO Yan Ting of PeerSafe, and CEO Ji Cheng Chen and CTO Zhang Feng of PeerSafe’s technology subsidiary called Peercom.
PeerSafe is the only Chinese company that is authorized by the Ministry of Public Security to sell information security products and certified to classify commercial cryptocurrencies and is able to supply software to public agencies of the central government.
CTFU that is currently being built by PeerSafe is a major trade platform that has ICBC (Industrial and Commercial Bank of Korea) and 12 banks such as China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of Korea, and Bank of China from China Banking Association (CBA). The project was initiated from a blockchain-based trade platform that China Construction Bank has been managing since January of 2018. In December of 2018, CBA announced its plan to launch the CTFU platform that expands China Construction Bank’s trade platform towards the entirety of China.
CBA has chosen South Korea as the base for expanding the CTFU platform towards other Asian countries. This project, which is also called CKTF (China Korea Trade Finance transaction platform), is overseen by PeerSafe, which has been leading the entirety of the project such as the project’s concept, plans for the project’s operation, and technologies of blockchain system since 2018, while Medium has been selected as South Korea’s technology partner.
Medium explained that PeerSafe presented high-performance blockchain technologies based in Hyperledger that are able to expand the CTFU platform towards the entire ASEAN region as a selection criteria and that Medium was selected after going through various performance verification processes that had taken place since August last year.
The company is expected to play a major role in providing high-performance blockchain called “MDL (Medium Distributed Ledger) infrastructure” for stable operation and expandability of the CTFU platform, exchanging technologies with Chinese companies for system integration companies, and becoming a testbed for South Korea for globalization of South Korean companies. It plans to create a consortium within South Korean banks in order to establish a stable connection within trade transactions between South Korea and China that can be worth up to $243.4 billion annually and improve the cost structure where hundreds of millions and billions of dollars are wasted in international trade transactions.
“Just like China’s finance consortium, South Korea’s commercial banks are already participating a consortium and the number is growing gradually.” said CEO Kim Pan-jong of Medium. “Our company will do our best so that the platform between South Korea and China can become a global financial platform that covers the entire world.”
Staff Reporter Koo, Kyohyeon | kyo@etnews.com