Recently, a consortium of Spanish companies has created the first multi-sector Blockchain-based technology platform known as Red Lyra. This is an important phenomenon for the fintech sector especially with the caliber of the institutions involved and could be big for the Spanish and global fintech considering these institutions’ previous experimentation with Blockchain.
Grant Thornton and Cecabank, a wholesale bank, built in a single week the multisector consortium which brings together pioneer companies in various sectors. Some of the participating institutions include Banco Sabadell, Bankia, Banco Santander, Bolsasy Mercados Espanoles (BME), and BBVA. This is a clear indicator that legacy players are interested in Blockchain to the extent of organizing themselves and forming something useful within a week. It will be remembered that at the beginning of this year, three traditional banks; Santander, Bank of New York Melon, and JPMorgan founded an alliance known as Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) with the aim of building and promoting the use of distributed ledgers.
Banco Santander has also invested in several other firms committed to the development of distributed ledgers such as Ripple and Digital Asset. Madhvi Mavadiya of Forbes spoke to Julio Faura who heads R&D Blockchain at Santander about the formation of Red Lyra and the significance of consortiums of this nature in the fintech sector. The response was that indeed Lyra was one of its kind, being the first time a wide group of public companies, public notaries, public institutions, entrepreneurs, and lawyers are working together to build a smart contract Blockchain enabled network with the aim of enabling settlement of transactions between parties with full legal validity.
According to Faura, digital identity is an essential building block necessary to support any legally binding transaction in any kind of application. Blockchain technology and more specifically ethereum has proved that it can be securely used in public networks at a scale. Moreover, it has enormous potential for application in private, enterprise-grade settings.
Faura believes that digital identity is one of their critical building blocks that must be put in place through the leadership of public notaries and lawyers. Consequently, this will open many opportunities for fintech players to offer their solutions to banks and other financial institutions; including the startups in which Innoventures has invested. Lyra is expected to provide banks, public institutions, corporations and law firms the possibility of having a standard common platform on which to conduct legally valid transactions. It intends to provide a flexible but powerful ground to build new innovative solutions and services in real time collaboratively and efficiently.
Red Lyra is a transversal non-partisan multi-sector initiative open to growth and allowing any company, administration, freelancer, startup or other organization to join at any time and develop projects to provide solutions.
