Deloitte, a multibillion-dollar company providing consulting and financial advisory services to major corporations worldwide, has installed of a bitcoin ATM in their Toronto head office. What does it mean?
The Deloitte-powered bitcoin ATM (BTM) was tested by Cryptocurrency Certification Consortium President Michael Perkin, who assessed its user-friendliness, intuitiveness and overall efficiency.
Perkin stated that the machine had a very intuitive user interface for beginners to utilise and handled conversions and trading smoothly.
President of @_CFour_ Michael Perkin tests the new #btm at the Deloitte Toronto office #bitcoin #BTC #changetheworld pic.twitter.com/hePjhLKCnf
— #TheSocialWallet (@thesocialwallet) September 6, 2016
Mainstream adoption
Over the past few years, Deloitte has established various blockchain research groups to study the technology’s impact and applicability in the traditional finance industry. The organisation released a series of long form investigative research papers to help major financial corporations and banking groups understand the underlying concepts of the blockchain technology.
However, the installation of BTM endorsed by Deloitte suggests the decline of interest in the blockchain technology.
In an interview with Futurism in February 2016, Andreas Antonopoulos described three important stages in the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin.
“Banks are finally past the stage of denial and are now in the bargaining stage. They’re facing a highly disruptive technology and are not sure how to respond. They can’t buy, co-opt, de-claw, sue, or ban this technology and, consequently, are attempting to separate bitcoin from its characteristics of openness, decentralization, borderlessness, and permissionless access,” said Antonopoulos.
The first stage of denial came to an end as banks aimed for the implementation of the blockchain technology. They are currently in the bargaining stage, in which banks attempt to neutralise their bitcoin-caused losses by implementing their own version of the technology. The final and third stage, Antonopoulos states, is adoption.
According to this view, once banks and major financial institutions realise that the blockchain technology without bitcoin is of little use for their systems, they will turn to Bitcoin and inevitably adopt the cryptocurrency to due to the growing demand from its customers and its market dominance.
Deloitte’s recent installation of a BTM may indicate an important change in the approach of banks and major corporations towards bitcoin.
Joseph Young
