BBVA Can't Hold Cryptocurrency

After becoming the first financial institution to combine public and private blockchains in a live transaction, Spanish multinational bank BBVA has hit something of a quandary.

In the process of executing what was expected to be the third in a series of blockchain-based corporate loans, the bank had to work around a lack of legal and regulatory clarity over whether it could hold the cryptocurrency needed to power a transaction on ethereum.

In short, BBVA's innovation is meant to act like a public notary service, combining private Hyperledger technology with a public blockchain in an effort to identify and store each loan agreement with auditability.

Erring on the side of caution, BBVA chose to abide by European Banking Authority recommendations and not use the native token of ethereum, ether, which also serves as a kind of fuel to update the ledger.

The lessons learned from the tethered loans will be taken on into BBVA's blockchain syndicated loans project, which will launch in the coming weeks.

As far as the public part is concerned, Pertusa acknowledged that while public blockchain notarization is a powerful tool for those who know how to use it there still needs to be plenty of education elsewhere.

Turns out public blockchains are a popular tool for anchoring data - that is, creating a timestamped proof that the data existed at a certain time - in the world of enterprise ethereum.

Kaleido, the partnership between ethereum development studio Consensys and Amazon Web Services, found that enterprises wanted to anchor private blockchain applications on the public chain more than just about any other blockchain-as-a-service feature.

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