During the last couple of months, banks and financial institutions have continuously showed their interest in bitcoin, for various purposes, such as digitally signing contracts, helping with monetary transfers and more.

Perhaps one of today’s biggest monetary challenges is the presence of hackers. While they cannot crash the entire world economy by ‘deleting’ money, they can cause a great deal of damage to banks and financial institutions by changing what computers think is real and true. This represents the main reason why banks are seeking a system that would guarantee the authenticity of data, by thoroughly analysing it, and keeping records on a ledger. Blockchain technology, which is quickly picking pace, can do exactly this.

In a world with an unstable financial system, and where bitcoin is slowly, but surely becoming the choice of exchange for millions of people, it is understandable that banks are against bitcoin, but so far, nobody is sure to which extent.

In this article, we will try to cover the main reasons explaining why banks often tend to hate Bitcoin, yet are very interested on its underlying ledger, the blockchain, and its potential on the market.

So far, there have been numerous reports regarding the positive influence that the blockchain network could play on banks from all around the world, yet no actual studies had been carried out.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, public and investment banks from all around the world had to deal with increased regulatory burdens, but also higher compliance costs that in turn led to increased interests and taxes for their clients. Innovation budgets were also lowered, thus explaining why we haven’t seen an evolution in the way banking is done in the last 10 years.

The blockchain hype has now been going on for several months, and numerous advancements have been noticed. According to recent reports, Goldman Sachs has just submitted a patent application that focuses on the idea that blockchain technology can be used to cut out the middle man, and change the current financial processes.

The patent, known by the name of “Systems and Methods for Updating a Distributed Ledger-Based on Partial Validations of Transactions” was initially published on the 8th of September, and filed back in March 2015. This means that it is the financial giant’s first blockchain-based patent so far.

According to a recent research paper published by the Santander Bank, the rise of bitcoin, and its underlying technology, the blockchain, can end up having a strong impact on the card market, by hurting both acquirers and issuer banks, but benefitting credit and debit card emitters such as MasterCard and Visa.

The paper, which is mostly focused on the Brazilian market, warns that the region’s largest debit and credit card operator, Cielo, will be negatively affected if bitcoin adoption grows. In fact, researchers at the Santander Bank believe that the entire business models of both Cielo and other similar firms will be challenged, due to numerous merchant discount rates and the POS revenues.

Through time, banks and other financial institutions have taken different approaches when it came down to dealing with the Bitcoin revolution. With this in mind, it seems like the Bank of England will take a different approach: if you can’t beat them, join them.

According to a research paper published this week by the bank, economists working for it have stated that central banks should issue their own digital currency. By using a case study carried out in the US, they concluded that doing so is likely to give national economy a boost of at least 3%, while also offering policy makers the tools needed to handle financial crashes and booms.

Surprisingly, after a couple of years of stating that Bitcoin has no future and that it does not represent a trustworthy digital currency, the governments are interested in both the coin, but also the system powering it up- The Blockchain.

With this in mind, during the last couple of months, there have been continuous reports discussing how banks, institutions and governments would like to leverage the power and resiliency of the Blockchain, in order to implement a smarter financial system, which would allow people from all around the world to carry out transactions faster, which would then be permanently recorded into the public ledger, known as the Blockchain.

As Bitcoin becomes more and more popular, a larger number of people are beginning to develop projects surrounding the cryptocurrency, and one of these is backed by the idea of a bitcoin wallet acting as a bank, and therefore, doing just about everything that a bank is entitled do.