Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America said he supports the development of blockchain technologies behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Speaking at The Economic Club of Washington DC, Mr Moynihan was asked whether he was worried about the rise of cryptocurrencies.
He said: “If you think about cryptocurrencies there are two or three different concepts embedded in.
“One is the concept of distributed ledger, the so-called, which is the idea of verified ownership interest in something that can be verified by anyone.
“It sounds really sexy but that’s what the registry deeds are, the registry of motor vehicles is, it’s a concept that’s existed forever.
“The question is we do cross-border transactions, it’s harder to figure out who owns stuff deep in the supply chain.
“The way you do it, it's you rely on local banks to put LCs behind, you know, pieces going in the supply chain.
“If you get the blockchain technology, that’s tremendously interesting to change the amount of work it takes to verify ownership.
“So we have 40 patents on that already, more than most people.
Mr Moynihan added he believes in the 'digitalisation of currencies' as many of the payments made by Bank of America’s customers in 2017 were virtual.
He said: “The second thing is digitalisation of money. We believe in that.
“53 per cent of all payments made in January 2017 generating by Bank of America customers were made in digital form.
“And that doesn’t include swiping your credit card at a Starbucks. That includes bill payments and wires and things. So that’s important.”
Blockchain is a distributed peer-to-peer ledger which facilitates the recording of transactions and assets on a network.
Today blockchain is most commonly known as the underlying network on which bitcoin transaction are made.
