Shopper safety must be key in digital asset initiatives

SINGAPORE — Banks need to prioritize client safety as they embark on digital asset experiments, mentioned Umar Farooq, chief government officer of JPMorgan’s blockchain unit Onyx.

Many blockchain initiatives and different crypto protocols have the potential to make monetary companies extra environment friendly, accessible and reasonably priced. However with out correct precautions, they might additionally expose prospects to cybersecurity dangers.

In latest months, many crypto buyers have been struck by hacks and scams. For instance, crypto alternate Binance was hit by a $570 million hack in October and Deribit misplaced $28 million in a scorching pockets hack this month.

“What a financial institution must do from a regulatory viewpoint and buyer’s viewpoint is that we have to defend our prospects. We can’t lose their cash,” Farooq mentioned throughout a panel on the Singapore Fintech Pageant 2022 on Wedneday.

“I do suppose you want some form of identification resolution or know-your-customer resolution which verifies who the human being that’s interacting is and what they’re allowed to do. As a result of with out that, in the long term, it simply would not work,” he added.

Farooq defined that JPMorgan is utilizing an answer referred to as verifiable credentials that stay within the buyer’s blockchain pockets. When the shopper goes to a protocol to commerce, the protocol validates the credential.

“I can not foresee folks with the ability to ship cash throughout borders if nobody checks and nobody is aware of who’s sending cash to who, as a result of eventually they are going to be in a cash laundering incident,” mentioned Farooq. 

“So these are the very basic issues that should be addressed earlier than you even get to systematic points. Schooling, safety and identification should be in place,” he added. 

Farooq and Onyx tackled a few of these safety and verification points as a part of Undertaking Guardian, an trade pilot the Financial Authority of Singapore introduced in Could.

“It was very, very arduous,” Farooq mentioned.

Within the pilot, DBS Financial institution, JPMorgan and SBI Digital Asset Holdings carried out transactions in tokenized international alternate and authorities bonds. Tokenizing a monetary asset includes changing its possession rights into digital tokens. It permits monetary transactions resembling borrowing and lending to be carried out autonomously on a blockchain with out the necessity for intermediaries.

“It was the primary time we had tokenized deposits. I truly suppose it is the primary time any financial institution on the planet has tokenized wallets on a public blockchain,” Farooq informed CNBC in an interview.

“Utilizing public blockchain, we had to spend so much of time pondering by identification. We did a number of audits of sensible contracts as a result of once more — they had been publicly seen. And at last, it was utilizing a protocol to truly make all of it occur. It is quite a lot of managing the dangers. All of those had been firsts for us,” he mentioned.