Note from the Publisher:  The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Goldman Sachs has exited from the R3CEV blockchain consortium as of October 31.  Goldman was an original member of the consortium, which has really broken the whole blockchain industry wide open.  According to R3's website:

"R3 is a financial innovation firm that leads a consortium partnership with over 50 of the world's leading financial institutions. We work together to design and deliver advanced distributed ledger technologies to the global financial markets."

They list NYC and London as their main offices, but also have locations in Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney.  Member firms (now minus Goldman) still include such major players as Bank of America, JP Morgan and State Street.

Goldman Sachs has stated they will continue to pursue their own blockchain initiative internally.  The firm has had an aggressive fintech push this past year, including the launch of Marcus - their new online lending platform, and the development of SETLcoin - a blockchain-based alt currency they've been working on for some time. 


AND TODAY WE HAVE A SECOND PERSPECTIVE ON THIS STORY FROM OUR CEO.................

Note from the CEO:  Quitter. Yeah, Goldman is a quitter and pulling out of the R3 consortium. Oh wait, Goldman is going on its own now that it has learned about its partners (er, former partners) plans and, oh my, filed its own patents. WHO could be surprised they might do that? Hmmmm!

 

The international Blockchain consortium R3 learned that Goldman Sachs has pulled out of the cooperative venture and will continue to pursue the technology on its own. Seems there was tension among the group’s partners that GS was kind of playing both sides of the street (gasp) and that made it hard to fully co-operate.

"Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has dropped out of the R3 CEV LLC blockchain group. The investment bank was one of nine original members of R3, founded in 2014 to explore the use of the distributed database technology in Wall Street infrastructure.

The technology, best known for underpinning the system that trades the virtual currency bitcoin, has garnered increasing attention as a way banks can save billions of dollars and make old-fashioned processes faster and more efficient.

But not all blockchain firms are the same, with different banks backing different ventures to exploit the technology. As of Oct. 31, Goldman let its membership lapse in R3, one of the higher profile efforts, but the firm will continue to work with blockchain technology, a spokeswoman for the investment bank said."

Source: WSJ.com
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