François Groepe: Launch of the Project Khokha report

Opening remarks by Mr François Groepe, Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, at the launch of the Project Khokha report, Johannesburg, 5 June 2018.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Central bank speech  | 
07 June 2018

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

On behalf of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), I would like to extend a sincere and warm welcome to everyone here today on the occasion of the launch of the report on Project Khokha, which had as its scope the trial of interbank wholesale settlement using distributed ledger technology (DLT). This was our first DLT initiative; its aim was to contribute to the global initiatives that assess the application and use case for DLT.

I am pleased to confirm that Project Khokha was successful in that it proved that the typical daily volume of the South African payments system could be processed in less than two hours with full confidentiality of transactions and settlement finality. This was done using ISO1 20022 standard messages within two seconds across a network of distributed nodes and with the requisite resilient distributed consensus.

The SARB is pleased that so many of you have taken the time out of your busy schedules to join us today. We appreciate that there is great interest in this work, both locally and from abroad.