Goldman Sachs has reportedly filed a patent for a blockchain technology that it plans to integrate into its settling mechanism.
The bank’s patent, which was filed on March 14 with the US Patent Office, outlines the technical and computational requirements necessary for using blockchain in its settling mechanism. The document focuses on smart contracts applied to financial instruments such as insurance, bonds, fractional reserve banking, margin loans, and securitized products. It includes a computer-implemented method of providing joint claims to tokens, which would facilitate a networked computing environment suitable for providing joint claims to a token, using a computing system architecture.
According to Goldman Sachs’ global head of the digital assets team, Mathew McDermott, the bank is showing strong support for blockchain applications. During a recent interview with Bloomberg, McDermott said that the team, consisting of about 70 members, would consider hiring more personnel as needed in 2023. Hong Kong recently employed Goldman’s private tokenization platform, GS DAP, to sell digital green bonds, which reduced settlement time from five days to just one, and sold $102 million of the bonds. While some analysts suggest an emerging patent “arms race” in the blockchain sector, this is the first time Goldman Sachs has publicly signaled interest in blockchain technology.
