The Financial Blockchain Shenzhen Consortium (FISCO) has announced the launch of FISCO BCOS, a revolutionary coinless blockchain platform designed to meet the regulatory and operational requirements of the financial industry. FISCO, which is one of China’s largest blockchain consortiums has more than 100 members including WeBank, and tech giants Tencent and Huawei.

 FISCO BCOS Technical Details

Built by a FISCO Taskforce Team that includes Tencent Cloud, WeBank and Shenzhen Securities Communication, BCOS is an open-source platform that combines the functionality of a permissionless blockchain with a coinless framework such as that used by Hyperledger Fabric and R3 Corda.

This framework, called an Open Consortium Chain was pioneered by WeBank, and its purpose is not to serve as a single blockchain platform, but instead to become an entire blockchain ecosystem in its own right, made up of a number of blockchain applications aimed to solve specific problems.

The platform was designed for the express purpose of meeting the peculiarities of the financial industry in terms of regulatory requirements and operating demands. It gets around the problems commonly associated with blockchains such as long delays and low concurrency by using a unique platform design framework that it claims vastly improves transaction handling capacity.

BCOS claims that a single chain can handle more than 1000 transactions per second with split second confirmation, which is key to the operational demands of a large financial institution. It also claims that through the use of upgraded architecture and localized optimisation to a single chain, it makes safe and efficient concurrent computation and parallel expansion possible. This enables developers to seamlessly add more servers as required in line with business capacity requirements.

Regulatory Tie-in and Use Cases

According to FISCO, BCOS incorporates observatory nodes that enable regulators and auditors to access live, real-time data. It also provides a selection of development interfaces to help developers write smart contracts easily and effectively. From launch, BCOS use cases have been developed across a wide range of applications including copyrights, arbitration, recruiting and finance.

FISCO also says that BCOS has already helped along a number of projects and ideas including Open Chain Ecosystems, cross-consortium collaborations and Distributed Business Models. Its open source nature has also enabled public members to leverage BCOS in launching applications across tourism, gaming, finance, supply chain, recruitment and copyright transactions among other fields.

According to the announcement, BCOs will be officially unveiled at the Singapore Fintech Festival between November 12 and November 14.