The finance industry is preparing for the future, and the developers of cryptocurrencies, which they initially did not consider important, are laying the foundation for this future. This journey, led by Nakamoto, has brought thousands, even tens of thousands of innovations today. Numerous products have emerged, ranging from blockchain-based oracle services to decentralized trading platforms.
Citigroup and Blockchain
Forbes defined it as the world’s largest company, with $1.9 trillion in assets under its management. Founded with the help of the famous Rockefeller family and the Rothschilds, Citi announced today that Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions will provide corporate clients with a range of blockchain-based services. For this purpose, a partnership has been established with Maersk.
Financial institutions, aware of the significant victories in the battle against regulators on the classification of digital assets and how they will be classified, continue their experiments in this field. According to experts, the market for tokenized assets will reach trillions of dollars in the future and will provide a much cheaper alternative to the current system.
What Will Citigroup Do?
According to Bloomberg and other sources, the bank will expand its offering package to allow customers to deposit tokenized cross-border deposits. However, Citi will offer these new offerings to its private corporate clients, not all customers. These new offerings are the result of a partnership with Maersk, and Citi is implementing these products through smart contracts after intense efforts.
With the new system, transactions that used to take days for approval and verification can now be completed in minutes or even seconds.
In June, it was reported that Citi had started talks with Metaco, the crypto custodian recently acquired by Ripple, according to Bloomberg and other sources. Furthermore, in June 2022, Metaco made the Harmonize platform available for Citi’s use, allowing Citi to test the tokenization of assets.
In October 2022, Citigroup led the seed funding round for Xalts, which operates in the field of digital assets and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Taking all these details into account, Citigroup can take more concrete steps to tokenize assets and create an alternative to the existing system in the crypto field. This will also be an important threshold in the institutional acceptance of cryptocurrencies. With the world’s largest asset managers already lining up to issue Bitcoin ETFs, it would not be possible for Citi to stay out of this field.
