Digital banking network Metallicus has announced the completion of its testing and certification phase and the launch of its services on the U.S. Federal Reserve’s FedNow instant payments platform, Cointelegraph reported.

Metallicus COO Don Berk said Metallicus has been working hard to become a financial institution service provider for the FedNow Service and worked closely with bank partners and engineering teams to ensure successful certification.

Metal Blockchain is an open, zero-layer Avalanche fork designed with security and theoretically unlimited scalability. Its design allows for an unlimited number of subnets to be deployed, each capable of processing 4,500 transactions per second.

The Federal Reserve launched the FedNow payment service in July 2023, which aims to enable instant payments and replace the outdated FedACH system. The FedNow system is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and costs about one-fifth of traditional wire transfer services.

Despite the comparisons to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), the U.S. Federal Reserve claims that the FedNow Service has nothing to do with CBDCs and that the government itself does not bear any fiduciary responsibility.