The press covering blockchain developments has gone full nuclear. As multinationals from banking, technology, and other industries query into the space, the press has slowly caught onto the trend. It’s almost as if the biggest corporations have started their own industry, parallel to Bitcoin, but hardly overlapping. One thing about this industry? It’s not yet produced a thing other than wild theories about what blockchain technology could do.
The excitement of blockchain has created a seemingly new industry, the blockchain industry. When you go to a Blockchain conference, you don’t see some of the well-known figures of the bitcoin world. Instead, you see banking and technology professionals.
Read More: Bitcoin Remains Block Chain’s Sole Use Case
On Google Trends, you can see that Bitcoin is still much larger a phenomenon than Blockchain is today. That despite the fact that some of the most Googlable brand names have entered the “Blockchain Rush.” If you ask blockchain proponents, the blockchain is going to save the world. But, Citi has a more skeptical long term view of distributed ledger technology. A 48-page paper released this week by Citigroup researchers Keith Horowitz, Adrien Porter and Michael Croni dampens the recent excitement surrounding the Blockchain.
“We don’t view blockchain as an intermediate-term strategic threat to the profitable high-value cross-border payments business for the banks,” Mr. Horowitz wrote. “Large international banks are needed to transfer value across borders since currencies can only travel physically within their respective central bank system.”
The researchers add: “Central banks are likely, not willing to cede control of the money supply.” Despite this bearish view of blockchain technology’s potential effects on society by its researchers, Citi has been hard at work exploring the technology.
In 2015, Citi announced its work on distributed ledger technologies. As Kenneth Moore, head of Citigroup Innovations Lab said:
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