Mitsubishi UFJ has formed a joint venture with Akamai for the roll out of a new blockchain-based online payment network.

The result of a three-year collaboration effort, the Global Open Network, Inc. (GO-NET) was initially slated for introduction in 2019, but will not now see the light of day until H1 2020.



GO-NET aims to provide a comprehensive set of services, including support for existing payment processing functions, pay-per-use, micropayments and other developing IoT-enabled payment transactions.



Early tests of the platform demonstrate a capacity to process a million transactions per second and the ability to finalise transactions in less than 2 seconds.



The bank says there is also potential to further scale this processing ability, permitting the handling of 10 million transactions per second.



The network will likely undergo its first live test with the introduction of MUFG's digital currency asset MUFG Coin. The currency, which is pegged 1:1 to the Japanese Yen, can be downloaded to smartphones and used for micropayments, P2P funds transfers and for online shopping.



Hironori Kamezawa, group CDTO of MUFG and CEO of GO-NET, states: “Our goal is to enable rapid innovation in digital payment services, leveraging a transformative platform, with built-in security, hyper-scale and efficiencies. GO-NET aims to expand the payment network business to a global scale, and enhance the services to support diverse payment ideas in the upcoming IoT era.”