The Russian Sberbank decided to leave the ranks of the Masterchain blockchain project launched with the support of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation. In the commentary of CoinDesk, the head of the blockchain-lab of Sberbank, Oleg Abdrashitov, declared dissatisfaction with the speed, safety and overall efficiency of the platform.

According to him, as an alternative, the organization is considering corporate blockchain-platform Hyperledger Fabric from IMB and Quorum from JPMorgan.

“Masterchain” does not meet the requirements of Sberbank cases, so for all future research we will use corporate platforms such as Hyperledger Fabric or Quorum, ”said Abdrashitov.

The development of Masterchain, a private blockchain platform based on Ethereum, was announced by the Bank of Russia in September 2016. As the Russian regulator planned, the project was supposed to allow banks to quickly confirm customer data and transactions, as well as develop various financial services in a single electronic system.

Sberbank was one of the first participants of the Association "FinTech", which was created to launch the project. Other leading banks in Russia – Alfa-Bank, VTB, Raiffeisenbank and Otkritie – are also participants.

At first, the full-scale launch of the platform was planned for 2018, but later the dates for the start of its mass commercial use were postponed for another year.

It should be noted that the cost of developing Masterchain was not publicly disclosed, but in April 2017 it was reported that the annual membership fee for participation in the Fintech association ranged from 7.5 to 15 million rubles, that is, over the past few years, its participants are more likely all, spent a few hundred million.

According to Abdrashitov, the Masterchain test case – a decentralized depository system for issuing electronic mortgages – is important for banks. The National Settlement Depository (NSD) is possible and retains as a commission a small percentage of each mortgage it stores, but for Sberbank this amount is millions of dollars a year.

In turn, a decentralized system, although it requires investment in the development phase, after launching is cheaper. But not Masterchain, noted Abdrashitov. In addition, the commissioning of the platform, scheduled for July, does not seem to take place due to the slow work on the part of the FinTech Association.

“We have not yet taught the new release of the decentralized depository system and have not tested it, so the proposed launch date is in question, ” he said.

Evgenia Ovchinnikova, director of technology research and digital innovation at Raiffeisenbank, who earlier this year took part in the Masterchain tests, also confirmed that the date of launching the platform into production is currently unknown.

Insufficient decentralization

Another problem, according to Abdrashitov, is that Masterchain is not decentralized enough. By its architecture, it is a private blockchain, that is, it is visible only to participants, and only approved parties can manage the node to confirm transactions.

And although this is not a problem for Sberbank itself, the Masterchain is too centralized even for such a format, since its work depends entirely on the Association’s central server, which controls the mining and consensus on the network.

As in the Ethereum network, Masterchain participants need to pay for gas per transaction, but the tokens for commissions are distributed by the FinTech node, and if the Sberbank node requires more tokens and starts mining independently, it disconnects from the network. Why it happens and on the basis of what principle such a decision is implemented, no one explained to him, says Abdrashitov.

Note that, as an alternative to IBM's HyperLedger Fabric platform from IBM, Sberbank has previously tested it. So, at the end of 2017, the leading bank of Russia carried out the first payment transaction in the country using the blockchain technology with the help of HyperLedger Fabric.

In May 2018, the Russian mobile operator MTS and Sberbank CIB made a deal to place commercial bonds using smart contracts based on the blockchain platform NSD. As part of the transaction, the ability to dynamically change the membership of the network to work with a wide range of investors was added, and an update was made to the latest version of the Hyperledger Fabric platform.

Representatives of Raiffeisenbank, meanwhile, confirmed that they were also examining other corporate blockchain platforms in parallel, including HyperLedger Fabric, Corda from the R3 consortium, and their own Ethereum-based framework called R-chain.

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