Online trading brokerage Fidelity Investments has joined the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts (IC3), a group of academic institutions working on to develop Blockchain technology.
Reuters has reported that Fidelity is the first asset manager to join the organisation. Fidelity Labs will join the team which includes Cornell University, University of California at Berkeley, IBM Corp and Intel Corp.
The Boston-based fund manager will collaborate with the group to develop blockchain programs to help make financial systems more efficient and secure.
Blockchain, which first emerged as the system underpinning cryptocurrency bitcoin, is a distributed record of transactions that is maintained by a network of computers, rather than a centralized authority.
Over the past two years, financial institutions have been ramping up their investments in the technology in the hopes that it can help the make some of its processes simpler and cheaper. Potential use cases range from systems to manage international payments, to programs to settle securities trades.
