Thailand Moves Towards Massive Blockchain Adoption

By Prashant Jha

Thailand is moving towards a mass blockchain adoption, where 22 banks and enterprises have decided to come together to build a common blockchain payment system for the country. The news came to light through a blog post published by Siam Commercial Bank (SCB). The blog post reveals that the Thai Bankers Association which comprises of 14 banks along with 7 state-owned enterprises and businesses have come together to build the Thailand Blockchain Community. The main aim of the Blockchain association is to enhance the efficiency and competitiveness. The blog post also shed some light on the participating members of the project and read: “The organization that initiated the creation of Thailand Blockchain Community Initiative consists of Siam Commercial Bank. Bangkok Bank Krung Thai Bank Public Company Limited Krungsri Ayudhya Bank Kasikorn Bank Kiatnakin Bank CIMB Thai Bank TMB Bank, TISCO Bank, Thanachart Bank, Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives, UOB Bank, Standard Chartered Bank (Thai) and Government Savings Bank.” The project will be headed by the Commercial Bank of Thailand and lists IBM and Accenture as the consultant firms. Thailand’s SCB bank has been showing interest in implementing blockchain for better transaction time and lower fees for quite some time now. The largest commercial bank in the country has recently incorporated Ripple made banking solutions in their operations which helped them bring down the transaction time from a couple of days to under three minutes. The bank has also shown interest in using XRP token in its operations in some manner but insisted that there is no solid plan behind it and users might need to wait for an official announcement before anything in that regard materializes. The central bank of Thailand has also shown interest in using the blockchain aided system for interbank settlements. Not only Thailand many commercial and central banks around the world have come together to create a blockchain based decentralized Utility settlement token which can be used by the banks to directly convert any currency form in its digital equivalent which then can be transferred across the borders and liquidated back to the fiat amount by the receiving bank.