Considered as one of Big Four state-owned commercial banks and the largest bank in the world by total assets ownership, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has announced that they are planning to patent their blockchain exchange platform for financial assets exchange.

The patent was previously published earlier this January and also released online on July 6th. As described in the application, ICBC aims to create a system which all related organizations can be each node of a decentralized platform.

When a user of an organization send out a transaction request, a smart contract will be activated to ask every node to verify the transaction on the basis of provided information (sender’s account balance, name and transaction amount. A transaction is complete only if the system receives adequate validations from involved nodes to achieve consensus above pre-determined threshold

Based on their explanation, the goal of this system aim to decentralize the network, enhance the transaction efficiency and increase the liquidity of financial assets.

The bottleneck in their current system is the operation of both interbank and cross-border transaction for normal payments, even financial instruments. With the existing network, the payment process is,somehow, time-consuming and costly.

According to the China State Intellectual Property Office, the patent application this time is not the first time that ICBC patent a blockchain-based innovation. Previously reported on CoinDesk, the bank is also planning to patent a blockchain for KYC, particularly to verify user information over a distributed network.

As reported from South China Morning Post, ICBC replaced the first ranking of Well Fargo to be the the largest bank in the world by total assets  from January 2017 This institution’s asset was around $3.6 trillion USD as of the end of 2017, as shown its latest financial report.