EIB Blockchain Challenge

The European Investment Bank’s Finance team invites its 25 major counterparties in the banking sector to an annual forum to reflect on common issues, such as financial instruments processing, regulation, infrastructure or organisational set-up.

This year’s forum was a special edition: based on the experience of a big data project in 2017, we wanted to go a step further in applying innovative technologies to optimise treasury transactions. That’s why, in the context of the forum, we organised the EIB Blockchain Challenge.

Check out the event agenda

Coders at the EIB: watch the video

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is an open, digitalised, shared ledger that can record transactions between multiple parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.

This technology, first implemented in 2009 as the core of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, is constantly evolving to enable scalability and secured applications.

Blockchain is founded on the combination of three key components:

• chains of data blocks that are cryptographically linked in order to ensure immutability
• consensus algorithms that secure the progression from one data block to the next based on a defined protocol
• a decentralised network of distributed ledgers that store the current state and the history of a given blockchain

Blockchain technology has the potential to significantly improve financial transactions (orders, payments, account tracking…) as it eliminates or reduces the use of paper, speeds up the process and increases efficiency.