Bank of America Files for a DLT Patent Citing Ripple

It has come to light that Bank of America has recently filed for a patent for a settlement DLT system citing the Ripple ledger. It is called “Real-time net settlement by distributed ledger system” according to Google Patents.

Bank of America has filed for a patent, citing Ripple’s technology. While the application itself was filed quite some time ago – on June 6th, only now this information has spread the world and the application status has been set to Pending.

The application describes a system which would be using a distributed ledger technology (DLT) as an interbank communication tool. With this system, banks would enable real-time settlements with transactions being sent to a shared, decentralized ledger to which both the banks would have access. The application itself has been filed by the Bank of America Corp.

“Embodiments of the present invention provide a system operatively connected with a block chain distributed network and for using the block chain distributed network for providing aggregate tracking and threshold triggering,” reads the abstract of the application.

The word “Ripple” itself gets mentioned only 2 times in the whole application. It refers to a “Figure 6” illustration which shows a profound Ripple settlement scheme.

The decentralized ledger would verify the identity of the payer and the payee. Also, it will allow communication between the institutions. The application has multiple visual figures ranging from 1-7 in which the whole DLT system is visualized in detail. While the word Ripple gets mentioned a few times, there is no mention of the Ripple systems native token XRP.

In other news, Thailand’s largest bank, Siam Commercial Bank, in June was struck with claims that they might be launching a system which could be using the XRP token. The bank denied these rumors, but at the same time, they tweeted that an “XRP system will be announced soon” (or not).

Earlier this month, the Ripple incubator “Xpring” distributed approximately $500 million to over 20 XRP related projects. This includes the blockchain-based gaming platform “Forte”. Recently, Ripple and Forte announced a $100 million fund in order to promote the use of XRP within gaming platforms. Ethan Beard, Senior Vice President of Ripple’s Xpring, said:

“Both Forte and Ripple have a shared belief that blockchain technology will have a massive impact on games, and that providing tools that are easy-to-use, chain agnostic and interoperable is a necessary step in driving scale consumer adoption.”

The head of Forte believes that the gaming industry has developed grounds for micro-transactions, but has stagnated in terms of innovation.

“The microtransaction-driven game industry has matured and consolidated, and as a result innovation has grown stagnant. Blockchain technology offers new growth vectors and an opportunity to do things differently,” said Kevin Chou, the CEO of Forte.