De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), The Netherlands’ central bank, is all set to support a new ‘blockchain development campus’, which will enable banks to develop and share information regarding the use of blockchain, the distributed ledger system behind Bitcoin.
The lowlands country has even appointed a new ‘Fintech Ambassador’ Willem Vermeend , a professor of Economics and a former minister of Social Affairs and Employment. He is expected to play the role of a bridge between the government, the fintech sector and the regulators. Everyone needs to work together
In order to facilitate learning and sharing of information among banks and other financial institutions, the DNB will open a campus in September.
Co-operation is certainly on the agenda as the Fintech Ambassador of the Netherlands Willem Vermeend told the Dutch daily De Volkskrant that while there is creativity in the Netherlands, the problem is that there are twenty parties (working on blockchain) who have no idea what the others are doing.
As an example, ABN Amro has already deployed a team of 30 people to look at the possibilities of using blockchain-like systems within their bank. Rabobank too has signed up to a partnership with NexusLab to explore further possibilities. DNB has a finger in the fintech pie
This is not the first time the DNB has toyed with blockchain, In June, DNB’s head of market infrastructures policy department, Ron Berndsen , had revealed details about the central bank’s experiments with its own experimental currency called DNBcoin.
In a speech given to the Dutch Blockchain Conference on June 20, 2016, Ron Berndsen revealed: “So last year we started our DNBcoin experiment. The general idea was that by adapting the Bitcoin software ourselves we could learn deeper how an actual implementation of the blockchain really works than if we would only perform desk research and […]
