After a lengthy wait, the oil industry now has its first distributed ledger technology (DLT) based trading platform, which launched earlier this week. As VAKT went live, it became the first enterprise-grade DLT trading platform in the oil and energy sector. VAKT is backed by some of the biggest names in the oil industry, as they are coming together to build this new oil trading ecosystem, which will help speed up the oil trading process by improving certain back-office processes.
JP Morgan and Quorum Helping Out
VAKT will make use of Quorum – JP Morgan’s private DLT. Quorum is a powerful DLT system that is completely private – meaning anything stored within it requires special permissions and cannot be accessed by the general public. In this sense, it’s similar to a traditional software implementation, but with the security and redundancy built in.
Bringing DLT Commodity Trading to the Masses
Unfortunately, VAKT isn’t for your average trader – it facilitates the physical buying and selling of oil globally. If you had a purpose for a barrel or two of oil – not to mention somewhere to store the toxic liquid – you could theoretically sign up and buy it. VAKT gives the world the ability to buy physical oil, something that has been very hard to get into over the years. DLT is revolutionizing the commodity trading industry and it’s only a matter of time before we can realistically buy and sell any commodity thanks to DLT.
Gibraltar Launching its Own Crypto Trading Platform
Gibraltar has used DLT to create and launch its own government-backed crypto trading platform. Built on top of state-of-the-art technology, the Gibraltar Blockchain Exchange (GBX) is changing the way people interact with cryptocurrencies and the entire trading experience. While you can’t trade commodities on the GBX, it uses the same principles and designs that VAKT is using to make trading slick and streamlined.
Saving Time and Money
The DLT being used in VAKT removes a large chunk of human interaction from the whole buying and selling process. This in turn reduces the time it takes to buy and sell by up to 40%, and with time savings comes monetary savings. That’s valuable human time that can be spent elsewhere in the process, keeping oil flowing around the globe and preventing oil shortages.
VAKT has made a concerted decision to use Quorum rather than Amazon’s new Quantum Ledger. The differences between the two platforms are few and far between, but the key difference is that Quorum is ready to be deployed. VAKT is already live for top oil companies and will be released to the public by the end of January 2019.
