Some of the world’s biggest banks are said to be investing around $50 million to build a blockchain-based digital cash settlement system.
A Reuters report on Friday, citing “people familiar with the plans,” said possibly a dozen unspecified banks are involved in the project.
Noelle Acheson is a veteran of company analysis and a member of CoinDesk’s product team.
The following article originally appeared in Institutional Crypto by CoinDesk, a free newsletter for the institutional market with news and views on crypto infrastructure delivered every Tuesday. Sign up here.
ABN Amro, Standard Chartered, ING and around 50 other banks and companies have participated in tests of a trade finance application called Voltron.
The open industry platform was initiated by eight founding member banks with the aim of improving the trade finance process by simplifying letter of credit transactions to deliver speedy settlement times and resolution of discrepancies, as well as improved sanctions screening, according to an announcement from distributed ledger startup R3.
The tests saw firms across 27 countries use Voltron, which was developed by R3 using its Corda platform, to make simulated letter of credit transactions.
The Takeaway:
France’s new crypto law grants blockchain-related projects the right to a bank account, provided they opt in to being regulated
There’s an optional certification or “visa” for ICO projects as well as crypto services providers such as exchanges and custodians
The new law paves the way for French life insurance and private equity funds to get more exposure to crypto assets
All of this is a far cry from the U.
Investment banking giant JPMorgan Chase is planning to expand an existing blockchain project to include settlement features as it seeks to fend off competition from payments upstarts such as TransferWise and Ripple.
The blockchain-based Interbank Information Network (IIN), set up in partnership with Australia’s ANZ bank and the Royal Bank of Canada back in 2017, currently allows its over 220 banking members to quickly address payments that contain errors or get held up for compliance reasons – problems that can takes weeks to solve with multiple banks being involved across the payments chain.
A new startup launched by the former co-founder of Simple Bank wants to provide early-stage fintech startups with traditional banking service functionality.
Sila, founded last year and until now operating in private alpha test phase, unveiled an open beta Thursday, inviting developers of fintech firms – including blockchain and crypto startups – to begin building new tools using its API.
The startup describes itself as an “all-inclusive API platform” for fintechs and other projects looking to modernize the financial space.
The banking arm of Chinese retail giant Suning is testing a consortium blockchain that would allow participating banks to record and update a shared ledger of users with bad credit scores.
According to a local news source Sina Finance on Thursday, Suning Bank developed the blockchain system in order to move its blacklist of suspect borrowers to a distributed database in an effort to allow collaboration with other banks on preventing credit fraud.
Nearly half of the 26 publicly listed banks in China say they deployed blockchain applications in 2017, according to a report.
Chinese banking industry news source CEBNet said Friday that, among the 26 Chinese banks, 12 of them disclosed in their annual filings that blockchain applications were adopted for various use cases over the last year.
The 12 institutions include major state-owned commercial banks such as the Bank of China, China Construction Bank and the Agriculture Bank of China, as well as other privately held ones, including China Merchants Bank and other city-level entities.
Two South Korea financial regulators are reportedly launching a probe into domestic banks over their implementation of anti-money laundering procedures for cryptocurrency exchanges.
According to a report from Yonhap, the Financial Intelligence Unit and Financial Services Commission (FSC) will launch the inspection starting next month at banks offering corporate accounts to cryptocurrency exchanges.
A major U.K.-based banking institution is reportedly barring its customers from using credit cards to buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
According to report from the BBC, the ban applies to the Lloyds Banking Group’s eight million credit card holders and takes effect on Feb. 5 across its subsidiaries, including Lloyds Bank, Halifax, MBNA and Bank of Scotland.
As reported by CoinDesk previously, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have both also barred the purchase of bitcoin for customers using credit cards this month.
A group of major financial firms including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs has trialed the exchange of equity swaps over a distributed ledger (DLT) system.
Using the AxCore distributed ledger platform from startup Axoni, the pilot – which also included BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse and Citi – saw the banks process equity swaps from start to finish, according to an announcement from today.
German blockchain startup Bitwala has launched crypto banking in Germany.
After securing €4 million (roughly $4.5 million) from VC firms Earlybird and Coparion in September of 2018 to develop a crypto banking solution, the company has allegedly amassed a waiting list of 30,000 potential users.
The state of Wyoming has passed a blockchain bill that allows banks to provide banking services to blockchain companies in the state. According to the legislative document, the new bill would create a new banking category called the Special Purpose Depository Bank, a group of financial institutions in the state that provide banking services to blockchain-based businesses.
In a statement from the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), an emergency relief action was filed to shut down AriseBank, which it described as “an outright scam.”
In a growing list of enforcement actions by the SEC, the complaint against AriseBank stated that the Dallas-based company had used deceptive tactics to raise what they claim was $600 million of its $1 billion goal in just two months.
Six Korean banks will begin allowing the simultaneous opening of accounts, deposits and withdrawals, as well as transfers of funds between these accounts and exchanges, beginning on January 30, 2018, but with some new restrictions.
The central banks of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia are jointly working on a cryptocurrency to enable cross-border transactions between the two countries.
Goldman Sachs, the global finance market’s second largest investment bank behind JPMorgan, will begin trading bitcoin futures for its clients, once major exchanges list bitcoin futures in the upcoming weeks.
Wall Street banks are hitting back at the upcoming bitcoin futures contracts, claiming that the finance system isn’t ready with continuing rising prices.
Cryptocurrency has opened up a new world in the financial sector that was primarily owned by banks, namely the borrowing and lending of capital.
While peer-to-peer borrowing and lending has developed in recent years in the fiat currency space, it is only recently that companies have been finding methods of replicating these ideas in the cryptocurrency space.
Paying with traditional banknotes is on the decline as interest in contactless payments and digital currencies rises.
That’s according to the co-founder of the Sohn Conference Foundation. Speaking with CNBC on the sidelines of the Sohn Conference in London, Evan Sohn said that a world without fiat money is quickly approaching, adding:
How far are we from a restaurant that says we only take online payment? If you eat here, you have to download this application and we only take electronic payment, no cash here, no check.
Earlier this month, Turkish Central Bank Governor Murat Cetinkaya emphasized that bitcoin could contribute to global financial stability with its decentralized and peer-to-peer (P2P) financial network.
Turkish Central Bank Feels Threatened by Bitcoin
The decentralized structure and nature of bitcoin completely eliminates the necessity of central entities and authorities within the network to settle transactions between two parties.
Кто знает подойдет ли этот кошелек для постоянного приема в сатоши? Я просто майнить не решился, но написал несколько ботов для того, чтобы они собирали с кранов монеты. Я так понял, что это веб-кошел...
