Venture arm of Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, Saudi Aramco, has invested $5 million in blockchain-based oil trading platform, Vakt.

According to the announcement, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures is now one of the twelve shareholders of the Vakt platform. With this freshly injected capital, Vakt plans to expand its services into new markets, particularly the Asian market.

Saudi Aramco is the largest oil producing company in the world, producing an average of 10.3 million barrels of oil per day, in 2018. Moreover, the country where it is based, Saudi Arabia, is the second largest oil producing country in the world.

As part of the investment deal, Aramco Trading Company will now be using Vakt’s platform, which is currently live in the North Sea crude oil market.

Hans Middelthon, is the Managing Director of Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures Europe. He claimed Vakt has demonstrated that their platform has the potential to digitize what is currently a very manual process. Middelthon said the platform can be truly transformative to earn users and customers.

He added that, Vakt has played an integral role in leveraging blockchain theory and applying it to the complicated world of post-trade processing.

Giant oil firms such as BP, Equinor, Reliance Industries and Shell, among others are all users of the Vakt platform.

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