Italy Partners With Algorand to Become First EU Country to Tweak Banking Systems With Blockchain

Algorand will support an upcoming digital guarantees platform in Italy to issue bank and insurance guarantees on blockchain.

Written by Radhika Parashar, Edited by David Delima | Updated: 14 December 2022 14:10 IST

Italy Partners With Algorand to Become First EU Country to Tweak Banking Systems With Blockchain

Photo Credit: Unsplash/ Emma Fabbri

Italy’s Algorand-supported platform is expected to go live next year

Highlights

Italy is looking to increase transparency using the blockchain
Algorand will support a digital guarantees platform in Italy
Italy will offer bank and insurance guarantees on Algorand

Italy has chosen the Algorand blockchain to bring about improvements in the existing banking systems starting in 2023. With this, Italy will officially become the first member nation of the European Union (EU) to mix blockchain with its financial and insurance systems. The blockchain technology, that also makes for the underlying technoloy used by cryptocurrencies, is now being examined by several countries to increase transparency in the banking sector.

Essentially, Algorand will support an upcoming digital guarantees platform in Italy to issue bank and insurance guarantees on blockchain, which is a digital ledger technology (DLT).

Insurance or bank guarantees are commodities promised by banks or insurance firms to mitigate losses in case of a loan default. A blockchain twist to the issuance of these guarantees could make the records more immutable, and hence more transparent.

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"Our goal is to help Italy not only recover from the economic impact of COVID-19, but also excel through innovation and leadership. Our ecosystemic projects are meant to help generate strategic platforms supported by Algorand. We selected Algorand because of its unparalleled level of security among permissionless DLTs, and because of its sustainability,” said Federico Rajola, Professor at the Research Center on Technologies, Innovation and Finance of the Catholic University of Milan (CETIF) in a press release.

Members from Algorand, the Bank of Italy, and the Italian insurance authority IVASS met in Milan this week to discuss the use-cases of blockchain in the banking sector. Over 30 financial organisations were also part of this meeting. The official Twitter handle of the Layer-1 blockchain platform announced this development on Tuesday.

Just in: Algorand has been selected to be the public blockchain that will support an innovative digital guarantees platform in Italy.

This new Digital Sureties platform is being developed by @Cetif1 and endorsed by @bancaditalia and @ivassocial: https://t.co/EBsOkBEwcb pic.twitter.com/dCFatoYILk
— Algorand (@Algorand) December 13, 2022

Earlier this year, Italy's Ministry of Economic Development planned to invest $46 million (roughly Rs. 360 crore) in subsidies for developing projects around blockchain technology as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT).

This month, Italy proposed a draft crypto law bill that would allow the country to levy a 26 percent tax on crypto profits exceeding over $2,000 (roughly Rs. 1.62 lakh).

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Italy's Algorand-supported platform is expected to come into existence in 2023.

Released in 2019, Algorand is a green, proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain. The developers of the blockchain claim to enable the convergence between decentralised finance (DeFi) and traditional finance.

Recently, the blockchain was also chosen by the Maharashtra government in India to store and support health data as NFTs.

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Further reading: Cryptocurrency, Algorand, Blockchain, Italy

Radhika Parashar

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Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More