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Blockchain technology may soon make the high fees, lengthy transaction times and opacity that have plagued legacy cross-border payments a thing of the past.
August 7 -
Blockchain technology can be used to help financial-services institutions accomplish their most important goal improving customer service, Blythe Masters said Tuesday.
July 28 -
Though lukewarm about Bitcoin itself, bankers see promise in the technology it runs on, specifically the distributed ledger, for efficiency and security improvements in areas like payments and securities handling.
June 1
The blockchain technology company Chain has raised $30 million in a round including participation by Citi Ventures, Nasdaq, Capital One, Visa, Fiserv and Orange.
Existing investors Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures led the round. Chain also announced that RRE founder and former American Express CEO Jim Robinson III has joined its board of directors.
San Francisco-based Chain, which launched slightly more than a year ago, designs and operates private blockchain networks for more efficient digital asset transfer in and between companies.
Vanessa Colella, Citi Ventures managing director and global head of venture investing and strategic growth initiatives, framed Citi’s investment as one that would enable greater experimentation with blockchain technology.
“It’s experimentation by a variety of different types of players that’s going to mature the applications that sit on top of the blockchain and inform underlying infrastructure decisions on what the distributed ledger evolves to become,” she said.
“We don’t think of this as making a single bet. We see it as a more broad-based platform for supporting experimentation and helping shape where this technology is going to evolve and Chain is well positioned to be a core part of that process,” she added.
The new investors will also form a Blockchain Working Group with Chain that intends to explore blockchain applications in different markets and identify points of blockchain interoperability between financial networks. Its biannual meetings will also involve technologists, academics, researchers and other blockchain experts.
