A Bitcoin currency fund? French bank will be the first

IBTimes UK, citing its source in the largest French bank – BNP Paribas, reported that the bank carries out beta-tests to include bitcoin in the currency funds of one of the branches in Paris.

The official statement is due to appear soon, while much more excitement is being generated by block chain technology itself.

IBTimes informator said, “We are looking at blockchain technology and how it can be used for post-trade processes to speed up potential things and reduce costs, but we have a lot of projects and all are tested.

Nasdaq OMG Group Inc. goes one step further and already announces the introduction of the technology behind bitcoin on its stock exchange already in the last quarter of this year. Nasdaq’s CEO said in an interview with Bloomberg’s agency that “the benefits for the industry are enormous and cannot be ignored”.

Wall Street professionals in a recent survey for Greenwich Associates almost unanimously stated that blockchain could be used in the financial industry. Many financial institutions are already actively looking at solutions using distributed accounting. 47% said their companies are looking at block chain technology.

Some of the leading banks, including Citibank, are even trying to create their own blockchain to speed up payments and settlements. Santander Bank, the 10th largest bank in the world, found more than 25 opportunities to use new technology in traditional banking systems. Santander is also co-author of the report, which states that implementation of block chain technology can reduce bank costs by up to $20 billion.

The Singapore DBS bank even hosted a May blockchain hackathon sponsored by IBM, and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A., (BBVA) had a large share of 75 million investments in Bitcoin Coinbase, while Goldman Sachs invested $50 million in another cryptocurrency company Circle Ins.

British bank Barclays went further and launched its startup accelerator, Barclays Accelerator, which is dedicated to FinTech and the blockchain-related startup. With the incubation of Safello, Atlas Card and Blocktraders, the bank will investigate cases of blockchain technology that could transform traditional banking systems.

Estonian bank LHV experimented with technology using Colored Coins, bitcoin-based deposit certificates. In its research, the Bank stated that “bitcoin blockchain is the oldest, best tested and safe [public key cryptography] and is also suitable for our current applications”.

The integration of the bitcoin model was also attempted by the New York Mellon bank, the German Fidor Bank integrated into the bitcoin.de exchange, and CBW Bank is a partner of Ripple – another digital currency. The two largest banks in Australia: Westpac and Commonwealth Bank of Australia also established a partnership with Ripple Labs to incorporate blockchain technology into their systems. Commonwealth Bank of Australia wants to use Ripple protocol to introduce rapid international transfers.

In mid-July, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges and the Coinbase payment processor published a report showing that the amount of bitcoin portfolios increased from 5 to 10 million over the last year. Of which 3.1 million are users of Coinbase, and 3.8 million people use the blockchain.info wallet. The daily amount of bitcoin transactions increased over the year by 94 percent from 60,590 in July 2014 to about 110,000 in July 2015. In the last six months, more than $397 million have been invested in bitcoin start-ups than in the whole of 2014.