Blockchain heralds brave new world for finance - as well as beyond the sector

FOUR of the world's biggest banks - UBS, Deutsche Bank, Santander, and BNY Mellon - recently announced team efforts aimed at pitching central banks to use blockchain to settle financial trades.

This group isn't the first; earlier this year, Goldman Sachs and Barclays had similarly invested in another blockchain venture, aiming to make real-time money transfers possible. Even JPMorgan Chase, an initial blockchain sceptic, joined Citigroup, Bank of America and Credit Suisse to test applications in credit derivative markets. Blockchain, a record-keeping technology that powers bitcoin - the first digital currency - has irrevocably gone mainstream.

Until most recently, bitcoin has been infamously associated with drug dealers, pornography, and illicit weapons trade. To invoke the kind of eagerness of big banks to experiment with blockchain as an emerging technology that might one day revolutionise the financial industry seemed farfetched.