Why more than a dozen big banks and tech firms are investigating blockchain technology
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2015, blockchain was a research question rather than a product: CNBC reports more than a dozen big banks and tech firms quietly investigating whether distributed ledgers could underpin markets infrastructure. Within months the investigation phase turned into formal consortia — Goldman Sachs, Barclays and seven other banks joined R3's framework-building effort that September, while IBM, JP Morgan and others backed the Linux Foundation-overseen Open Ledger Project for business blockchains by year-end.
The arc that follows makes this early survey piece the origin point of a four-year build-and-test cycle: JPMorgan Chase moved from consortium member to operator with its blockchain-based payment processing network alongside ANZ and Royal Bank of Canada in 2017, an alliance testing faster interbank payments scaled past 75 of the world's biggest banks in 2018, and UBS-led firms put more than $60M into a cross-border settlement token company by 2019.
First-order effects
- The named banks and tech firms shift from watching Bitcoin skeptically to funding internal research teams and shared consortia, with R3 and the Open Ledger Project emerging within six months as the two main venues for that spend.
Second-order effects
- Consortium membership becomes table stakes: banks outside the early groups face joining R3, the JPMorgan-RBC-ANZ payments alliance, or the UBS-led settlement venture, or risk being locked out of whichever shared standard wins interbank flows.
Third-order effects
- Reuters' later review of 33 high-profile financial-sector blockchain projects finding weak adoption and real limitations suggests the structural outcome is narrower than the 2015 ambition — shared ledger infrastructure persisting mainly where banks coordinate directly, like payments and settlement, rather than replacing market plumbing wholesale.
The trend: Bank blockchain strategy has run from exploratory research in 2015 through consortium building and live payment pilots, toward consolidation around a few shared networks even as independent reviews find adoption weaker than the investment suggested.