Another set of 13 major global banks have joined the cryptocurrency initiative set in motion by nine banks earlier. The banks that have now entered the fray are Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Citi, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, SEB, Societe Generale and Toronto-Dominion Bank . Earlier, Barclays, BBVA, CBA, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, State Street, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS had collaborated with financial innovation startup company R3 to take up research, experimentation, design and engineering to help advance state-of-the-art enterprise-scale shared ledger technology. The intention is to create a set of global standards for the use of distributed ledger technology in financial markets. The R3 team, led by former Icap electronic broking chief David Rutter, is made up of financial industry veterans, technologists, and new tech entrepreneurs, bringing together expertise from electronic financial markets, cryptography and digital currencies. Among the recruits are IBM’s blockchain head Richard Brown. The partners will now set up joint working groups, using a collaborative lab environment to test and validate distributed ledger prototypes and protocols as they seek to meet banking requirements for security, reliability, performance, scalability, and audit.
