... [+]Bloomberg Finance LP / Andrew Harrer
While the financial institutions behind Libor have been early leaders in exploring blockchain, they have been slow to implement the technology, which some believe could make some of their services unnecessary by directly connecting counterparties in trades. But the Ameribor use of ethereum shows one early instance of how a product previously provided by a group of banks is now being offered by upstarts and startups.
In the case of Ameribor, AFX will mint two non-fungible tokens for each party in a transaction. Unlike bitcoin, which is fungible, meaning every token is the same, these non-fungible tokens, compliant with the ERC-721 token standard, contain information about the transaction and the counterparty. The tokens are automatically minted by the AFX Blockchain when a transaction begins, and using the parity smart contract language are automatically settled when the transaction ends.