Last week, UK Finance hosted the RLN Hackathon, bringing together fifteen teams to prototype their own use cases on top of the ‘platform for innovation’ developed during the UK RLN Experimentation Phase. Our Editorial Content Specialist, Rachel Baugh, reports that all teams praised the quality of the API and their entries highlighted the essence of the RLN: it’s one infrastructure offering different types of money, backed by fiat currency. As such, its most powerful benefit may well be its ability to release liquidity across the sector.
In his opening remarks, Mark Jannetta, Director at EY’s FinTech Labs, set the tone for the event, describing the RLN Hackathon as, “both a demonstration and celebration of what the technology behind RLN can bring, the services it can provide and the benefits it can deliver to the UK.”
The teams were made up of innovators from fintechs, financial institutions and other industry players, all of whom were able to explore and build a range of new use cases that leveraged the capabilities of the UK RLN platform, demonstrating how the programmability of money can transform the way value and assets are transferred and managed. Representatives from Quant and R3 – the technology leads on the project – were also present to provide teams with technical advice and support throughout the event.
Over the first 24 hours, the teams were up against the clock to code their solutions and put together a presentation to deliver on day two. Representing Team Quant, one of our Engineering Leads, Ari Davar, showcased TrustSplit, a cost-splitting use case that introduced a secure, automated system for group spending, ensuring that spending can be tracked, and funds are settled correctly at an agreed point.
Key features of TrustSplit included:
- Commission per expense
- Budgeting for groups
- Advanced splitting and receipt scans
- Requiring approvals for settlement
- Time-based auto settlement
At the end of day-two, after much deliberation, the judges crowned Kaleido as the winning team. They presented a use case for digital asset interoperability, looking specifically at how to integrate commercial bank money into Web3, while thinking about the retail environment and considering privacy. Some of the benefits included allowing programmability across diverse asset ecosystems, improving privacy across business flows and enabling institutions to expand their assets to different networks.
The runners-up were Commerzbank, who explored a B2B corporate payments use case that enabled transparency, traceability and referencing of payments, and SETL, who built an application to tackle Authorised Push Payment fraud for car parking that could reduce fraud and increase cost efficiencies and scalability.
The closing remarks revealed a few key takeaways:
- The RLN API is clear, easy to use and makes integrations simple.
- The RLN offers users different forms of money. It’s one infrastructure with choice, where the singleness of money is backed by fiat currency.
- The release of liquidity is powerful – as we move from siloed ledgers towards atomic settlement, it has a profound impact on what we can do with that money.
- The enthusiasm, imagination, and professionalism of all teams really stood out. The UK RLN has momentum, it’s becoming a movement.
The UK RLN Hackathon was the perfect opportunity to explore the innovative capabilities of the RLN, trial potential use cases and gather feedback on the platform.
Thank you to UK Finance and the other technology partners, R3, DXC Technology and Coadjute who made the event possible, and congratulations to all the teams who took part, we look forward to seeing how the RLN will continue to transform the UK’s financial landscape in 2025 and beyond.
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