Earlier this week, Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) (BofA), one the United States’ largest financial institutions, made a massive splash in the crypto sphere as the details of its recently registered patent, entitled “Real-Time Net Settlement by Distributed Ledger System” and citing the Ripple blockchain, emerged in the press. Even though the extent and exact character of the proposed system’s reliance on Ripple is impossible to determine from the filing, the community of XRP holders and supporters rejoiced.
A piquant nuance is that the XRP token itself was never mentioned in documentation, suggesting a curious “Ripple without XRP” scheme that the patent’s authors elected to employ. This, in turn, led to speculations that patenting such an architecture would automatically urge all other banks to use “Ripple with XRP” — which, of course, is only valid in a world where Ripple has become a dominant infrastructure for interbank payments. In order to make sense of what the news means for the crypto industry as it currently is, revisiting a long record of BofA’s use of blockchain patents is a necessary first step.