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Bakong, the Kingdom’s digital payment solution introduced by the National Bank of Cambodia (NBC), has surpassed 10 million opened accounts, accounting for more than 60 percent of the country’s population, NBC Governor Dr Chea Serey told Nikkei Asia during an interview on Tuesday. Dr Serey was part of the Cambodian delegation led by Prime Minister Hun Manet during the recent visit to Tokyo to attend the Asean-Japan Summit commemorating 50 years of strong ties between the region and Japan. The figure is a significant milestone as around 60 percent of the nation’s population is now potentially utilising Bakong for transactions, Nikkei Asia report emphasised. Dr Chea Serey did share plans for expanding Bakong’s reach internationally, particularly through collaboration with UnionPay International, China’s card payment service, and other global partners. The NBC and UPI recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on cross-border QR code payment cooperation. Moreover, NBC aims to enhance the cross-border payment network for its digital currency, fostering seamless transactions beyond Cambodia’s borders. Dr Serey emphasised the importance of financial inclusion, highlighting the central bank’s commitment to furthering financial inclusion by focusing on consumer protection and cybersecurity. The NBC earlier signed a memorandum of understanding with Alipay the digital payment service of Ant Group, and established collaborations with the Central Bank of Solomon Islands, the Reserve Bank of Fiji, and the National Bank of Rwanda. The NBC has also inked a memorandum of cooperation with Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, laying the groundwork for QR code-based payments between the two countries. Launched in October 2020, Bakong was developed by NBC along with Japanese technology company Soramitsu using the open-source Hyperledger Iroha blockchain framework. The flexibility of using a blockchain for digital asset management allowed NBC and Soramitsu to implement fiat-backed digital representations of the Khmer riel and US dollar that would be accessible for wholesale interbank transactions as well as everyday retail payments. According to Makoto Takemiya, the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Soramitsu, the core of the system is run by NBC, which delegates the running of ‘payment gateways’ to financial institutions. “End users, such as mobile app users, connect to the system via these payment gateways. All the transactions are stored as a chronological chain of records, also known as a blockchain, which is replicated across multiple servers. “Unlike most commonly used permissionless blockchains, such as Bitcoin, the Hyperledger Iroha-based Bakong system does not rely on mining for finalising transactions, but rather uses a voting method, wherein a supermajority of servers that maintain the blockchain vote to finalise transactions that are arranged in blocks.”
Read more: khmertimeskh
