Ukraine Bank Discovers Stellar Blockchain Offers ‘Key Benefits’

The majority of TASCOMBANK’s two-year research adds a Stellar splash of fuel to Ukraine’s growing crypto sector.

Stellar has given cryptocurrency-friendly Ukrainians even another reason to be optimistic about blockchain technology.

A paper released on Thursday detailing the findings of two-year research on the viability of using the Stellar crypto ecosystem to transfer money across the war-torn nation outlined many grounds for hope about digital assets.

TASCOMBANK, one of the oldest and biggest banks in Ukraine, led the pilot research. It was the result of a 2021 bequest from a number of the nation’s leading banking regulators and politicians.

The TASCOMBANK study, commissioned in part by Ukraine’s influential Ministry of Digital Transformation, discovered a number of use cases (versus its TradFi banking system) for moving “electronic money” via Stellar — the blockchain launched by Ripple co-founder Jed McCaleb in 2014 after his departure from Ripple Labs.

The research concluded that Stellar enhanced the security and confidentiality of consumer data, and its “high throughput” transactions were much faster and cheaper.

Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Oleksandr Bornyakov said that the Stellar research showed a number of Ukraine-specific “important benefits” of blockchain technology’s real-world application cases. According to Bornyakov, Ukraine officials are investigating the prospect of adopting extra licences for digital assets.

Bornyakov said in a statement that the pilot’s findings demonstrated the primary benefits of blockchain. In particular, quick processing and cost-effectiveness of transactions, accountability and transparency of the system, as well as streamlined access to financial services.

Since Stellar’s network was out for two hours in 2019, however, the question of whether it is sufficiently decentralized has remained. Then, in 2021, a series of cryptocurrency exchanges banned withdrawals when transactions started to fail during a node outage.

Stellarbeat reveals the blockchain is currently maintained by 36 fully validating nodes and 13 lesser validator nodes — Stellar’s main competitor Ripple is supported by approximately 150 nodes, whereas Ethereum boasts hundreds of thousands anchored by nearly 11,500 physical nodes.

A lower validator count puts pressure on a small set of computers to keep the network working smoothly, while a higher validator count allows a larger portion of the network to go down without disrupting operations.

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