Case Study: South African Reserve Bank achieves 70,000 secure interbank settlements in under 2 hours with ConsenSys

Pushing the Limits of Interbank Payment Settlement with Blockchain

The South African Reserve Bank faced the challenge of increasing the resiliency and efficiency of its interbank payment system while maintaining strict confidentiality and reducing costs. To test whether distributed ledger technology could meet real-world wholesale settlement demands, the South African Reserve Bank partnered with ConsenSys Solutions and a consortium of seven commercial banks to pilot Project Khokha using Quorum, an Enterprise Ethereum solution.

ConsenSys built a permissioned Quorum proof-of-concept incorporating the IBFT consensus mechanism, Pedersen commitments, range proofs and tokenized ZAR to deliver confidentiality, finality and resilience without a single point of failure. The deployment processed 70,000 transactions in under two hours (condensing a business day’s workload by ~75%), achieved 95% block propagation in <1 second and 99% in <2 seconds, preserved full privacy, and earned Project Khokha the “Best Distributed Ledger Initiative” recognition — demonstrating measurable performance and scalability gains led by ConsenSys.

South African Reserve Bank

Francois Groepe

Deputy Governor