Though the industry has recently seen new attention from brand-name financial giants, one of the earliest institutions to embrace bitcoin and the blockchain was Estonia’s LHV Bank. Since 2014, LHV Bank has been working to study use cases for the emerging technology, striking partnerships with startups like Coinfloor and providing banking services to Coinbase . In June of last year, LHV even went so far as to launch its Cuber Wallet app , a blockchain-based wallet that allowed users to send digital representations of real euros.
In 2016, LHV says it is set to expand its experimentations, indicating its ambitions are now bigger than "creating yet another wallet". In a new interview, LHV’s cryptocurrency product manager Jüri Laur expanded on the state of his firm’s current projects and evolving industry theses.
Laur told CoinDesk that LHV remains interested in both digital currency and distributed ledger applications for the technology: "It’s fair to say we support the core values of bitcoin – namely decentralization and open permissionless innovation. That being said, we are a bank and have to operate within a certain legal framework and take all regulations very seriously which limits our choices at times." The firm’s openness to digital currency use cases notably comes at a time when industry investors are betting less on startups with this focus, and simultaneously, major financial firms are openly disparaging the idea currency applications for the technology have merit.
Still, Laur suggested his firm isn’t sold on the ideas of its peer institutions.
"I believe permissioned blockchains are suitable for certain use cases, but also lose a lot of the key qualities that make the technology so valuable," he added.
For his part, Laur says LHV is keeping its trials "blockchain agnostic", so that it would be able to adapt should an alternative blockchain become more widely […]
