A new Deutsche Bank Research report suggests that the Bitcoin ecosystem now includes a number of financial intermediaries despite the fact that it was created to be a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) cash system without such entities.
Intermediaries include Bitcoin exchanges and hosted wallets which have highly centralized liquidity within the alternative financial system.
Overall, the report seeks to examine the role of cryptocurrencies and distributed ledgers in the broader shift toward real-time payments.
The report also analyzes how different closed- and open-loop payment systems can achieve real-time global payments, offering an outlook for how it believes each can achieve this larger goal.
Notably, cryptographic ledger systems have to some extent already succeeded in bringing real-time payments to a relatively small market.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now