Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered made the first crypto transfer on UDPN

Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered recently conducted the very first digital currency transfer and swap using the new Universal Digital Payments Network (UDPN).

The UDPN is a DLT-based messaging backbone revealed to the public earlier this year. Its purpose is to establish interoperability between the crypto industry’s stablecoins and CBCs, which would allow connectivity between regulated digital currencies and any business IT system.

UDPN emerges as a Swift competitor

The network was created and set up by Red Date Technology and GFT Group. It was described as a gateway for businesses and financial institutions that can use it to reach regulated digital currencies and, through them, conduct cross-border transactions.

As such, the UDPN is something of a competitor to Swift, a bank-to-bank messaging network that traditional financial institutions have been using until now. Given that blockchain technology has essentially made Swift seem outdated and obsolete, the network has been conducting its own research of blockchain interoperability in an attempt to stay competitive.

Now, however, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered executed a real-time on-chain transfer and swap in the first proof-of-concept for the network. The test revolved around transactions between USDC and EURS stablecoins.

Details of the tests

SC Ventures set up a development environment, and used UDPN SDKs and APIs to build decentralized identities. It also linked cryptocurrency wallets, which were then used for conducting multiple transfers and swaps of EURS and USDC to crypto wallets owned by Deutsche Bank.

The Deutsche Bank initiated its own transfers, which resulted in swaps to SC Ventures’ own crypto accounts using a graphical user interface that was integrated in their dedicated UDPN environment.

Commenting on the move, SC Ventures’ CTO, Thorsten Neumann, stated that the initiative brought the industry together for the purpose of identifying opportunities that would allow financial institutions to unlock economic value in newly-emerging crypto sector.

“Tokenised forms of currency will inevitably become a part of the new financial landscape. Financial service providers and fintechs are well-positioned to experiment with stablecoins and CBDC use-cases that benefit from the finality of on-chain transactions,” he added.

The network already has multiple banks, payment service providers, and technology companies onboarded. Moving forward, these entities will participate in further tests in order to confirm that everything is working adequately before the solution starts seeing a wider use. According to reports, 11 more proofs of concept are scheduled to take place in the near future.