Fedwire is a real-time settlement system used by the US Federal Reserve and by US banks to settle financial transactions. To maintain confidence in the financial markets, it is vital that Fedwire is always available, so it was not good news to see this comment posted on Reddit on 2nd April 2019– “Today the United States Federal Reserve experienced an unexpected issue and went completely down. No incoming or outgoing wires went through in the entire country. It’s still unresolved and yet not one single news outlet seems to be reporting on this and the massive impact it has.”
Fedwire processed over $2.8 Trillion of transactions daily in January 2019, but as they’re a centralised system, it will always be more vulnerable compared to a Decentralised system. Bitcoin was created as a decentralised system and has only been unavailable for 0.02% of the time since it first started over ten years ago. Bitcoin now has more than 10,000 nodes, so it is doubtful they will all be non-operational at the same time, thus the attraction of a decentralised mode of operation.
Several previous Fed bank payments experts have been recommending for a while that the Fed updates its system, so maybe it will look at Blockchain technology to be part of its upgrade?
