ItBit, the first regulated bitcoin exchange in the U.S., hosts an invite-only "Bankchain Discovery Summit" today, on 27 July.

The meeting is expected to gather members of financial elite from major banks, brokerages and exchanges, CoinDesk reports.

The invitation reads:

The all-day event will take place at one of Convene’s meeting places located either in New York or Washington. The summit is not open to the press.

According to its official website, ItBit’s Bankchain is “the first consensus-based ledger system exclusively for financial institutions”. The company didn’t provide any specifics on the project yet. 

This May, ItBit became the first bitcoin exchange to operate legally in the U.S., receiving a license from the NYDFS. The company filed the application in February 2015. On 7 May, the company introduced the itBit Trust Company, the organisation to become a custodian for its clients’ assets while holding a bank-like status. The trust creation was overseen by the NYDFS, which carried out a comprehensive review of the company’s AML practices, security standards, and capitalisation structure. 

According to Simon McNamara, Chief Administration Officer at RBS, modern banks face the dilemma of whether “to ignore or to engage” the disruptive technology. As CoinFox wrote earlier, a growing number of high profile banks on both sides of the Atlantics started exploring the blockchain technology. This April, the Bank of New York Mellon announced it started experimenting with the blockchain. In June, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia stated it was going to use Ripple to transfer payments between its subsidiaries. Two other banks from the Australia's 'big four', Westpac Banking Corporation and the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, followed its example shortly afterwards. LHV bank Estonia and a Colored Coins software company ChromaWay AB created a new blockchain-based platform and a wallet for P2P transactions in Euros. The same month, BitPay’s CEO declared that his company was going to work on pilot projects with several major banks while Safello, a Scandinavian bitcoin exchange, reached a Proof-of-Concept agreement with Barclays bank on bitcoin payment platform. A recent paper from Santander Innoventures suggested that the blockchain technology may save banks $15-20 billion a year.

Nadya Krasnushkina