The $30 million funding of blockchain startup Chain, which included capital from a number of financial institutions including Visa, Citi Ventures, and Capital One, provided yet more evidence (as if any were needed) that banks are taking the blockchain seriously.
Chain’s other funders include Nasdaq, Fiserv, RRE Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital and SV Angel, as well as former Bank of America CEO David Coulter, X Prize Foundation CEO Peter Diamandis and MongoDB co-founder Kevin Ryan, according to CoinDesk. It has about $44 million in total funding.
Indeed, the coffee talk at today’s Consensus 2015 conference, organized by CoinDesk, centered around how cryptocurrency startups could work with banks to advance blockchain use. Needless to say, the chatter at bitcoin conferences in past years was quite different. Bitcoin is no longer discussed as a viable means of cross-border transactions, nor is it taken seriously as an asset class.
The price of one bitcoin currently sits at around $240, far from the heady, $1,000+ days of late 2013.
As Aditya Menon, managing director of global digital strategy at Citigroup, told The Economic Times of India earlier this month, “On the blockchain, there are two parts that interest us. One is, today we are one of the largest movers of money — up to $1 trillion or more on a daily basis — because we’re the only bank that actually operates in 100 countries. So, there is obviously an opportunity around our own general ledgers.” The other point of interest for Menon was Citigroup’s much-discussed in-house fiat-backed cryptocurrency, Citicoin.
Adam Ludwin, CEO of Chain, said on stage today at Consensus 2015 that he envisioned a “financial cloud” composed of interoperable blockchains in the future. These blockchains could connect and disconnect as needed, and would share enough technical underpinnings to be completely interoperable. Chain itself helps institutions implement the blockchain to move assets internally, but has the funds to strive for grander goals. Certainly blockchain initiatives are proliferating at banks, and companies such as Digital Asset Holdings, ItBit’s Bankchain, and R3CEV — as recounted in The New York Times — are working to bring banks together to build standards for the use of the technology.
Citibank using the blockchain for securities trading hardly qualifies as disruptive, unless what is being disrupted is older technology at the bank. In other words, the virtual currency world has made a 180-degree turn in two short years, and is now as bank-driven as the overall financial technology space, which also once cherished dreams of disruption.
This weekend bitcoin players will gather in Montreal to discuss enlarging the size of blocks that make up the blockchain. Banks don’t seem to be taking part — it’s only the bitcoin blockchain, after all. You can bet they will be taking notes, though — they have their own blockchains to consider.
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