A new bank opening in Puerto Rico is specifically targeting crypto users and businesses as potential customers, Coindesk reports.
The approach seems a bit expensive, but it will get the job done: certainly it will be possible for crypto businesses to reliably operate without having their bank situations continually shifting.
The trouble with working in gray markets such as crypto or marijuana is that things are always changing and complicating themselves.
New, gray, not-quite-legal markets need time to mature, and it’s hard to do that if you’re not even allowed a bank account.
The idea is that crypto investors have made enough now that they should simply found and fund their own banks.
But what happened to being our own banks?
Medici Bank bills itself as “fast, secure, and invisible, the way it should be.”
The Blockchainization of All Banks…
Presumably, a wave of banks could begin to support cryptocurrency services. It’s difficult to say whether the extreme volatility of crypto markets is a factor in banks taking an active interest in blockchain technology.
What is for certain is that a growing number of them, including Bank of America, are doing so.
Erstwhile, regulators are taking a renewed interest in cryptocurrencies after Facebook’s announcement of the Libra project, an apparent stablecoin that some politicians think might rock global finance.
It’s one thing to be a standard cryptocurrency, the object of many nerds’ obsession. It’s quite another to be a billion-dollar-business backed financial platform that could quickly and easily undermine the legitimacy of many world governments.
As a Rothschild once said:
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!”
…And More Tales From The Future
Governments have legitimate reason to be wary of Facebook playing around with fiduciary instruments.
Facebook also has legitimate grounds to launch a cryptocurrency – the company already sits on a multi-billion person network. Monetizing it, and involving the rest of Silicon Valley in the process, might unveil a new reality – “Silicoin Valley.”
In any case, the more banks like Medici that come to market with blockchain products, the more real infrastructure the blockchain economy has to build, maintain, and rely on.
At the end of the day we’re not fully in business until one user can send funds to another on the other side of the world, and the recipient can instantly get the transfer into cash.
From at least one important angle, that’s still the critical mission, and efforts like Medici would seem to further the cause. Perhaps a hybrid economy is to come – you can both be your own bank and trust a pro-crypto one.
