Russian payments firm Qiwi is currently designing its own proprietary blockchain in an effort to replace its central payments processing database. Called the "Qiwi blockchain system", the company’s development effort focuses on how its core database of customer transactions could be reimagined to reduce costs.
Qiwi is one of the largest payment service providers in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region, with more than 16.1 million digital wallet users and 62 million transacting customers per month.
Today, according to the company, all customer transactions are processed through a "database with two tables" that logs all customer transactions and keeps the balances of each account. Qiwi hopes to reimagine this process so that users would sign traditional transactions in the back end with a private key that they would use to control their account, and that would speak to and update and update its central ledger.
In interview, Qiwi communications director Konstantin Koltsov explained the impetus for the test and how the company hopes it will improve its operations.
Koltsov told CoinDesk: "[When] you have centralized processing, you have to pay more for security, to protect it, to maintain it physically, [to ensure] proper maintenance. You have costs to maintain all the technical infrastructure. We are testing the system to see if it may see a cost reduction for this initiative." Alexey Troshichev, blockchain processing architect at QIWI, explained that this system seeks the same efficiencies as the bitcoin blockchain, where miners receive transactions, and once proof of work is completed, seal these transactions into a block.
"We will collect transactions like the miners do, and once we [validate the transactions], we will produce or release this transaction with a block into the world. As a result the people will see, the users of the system will be public and proved," he said.
Troshichev […]
