Just announced today, global investment banking giant Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS) has left the R3 distributed ledger technology consortium it helped to found two years ago, reported by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The multinational finance company was one of nine original members of R3. The consortium however continues to build momentum since its beginnings with its member ranks growing to more than 70 of the financial services industry’s biggest players.
The WSJ reported that Goldman let its membership lapse on October 31st.
Instead, the bank will focus its blockchain efforts on internal development and investments in specialists. It has already made multi-million dollar bets on two startups in the field: Circle and Digital asset Holdings.
Distributed ledger technology is best known for supporting bitcoin and other digital currencies. Banks have been interested in using blockchain to speed up transactions from old legacy systems while saving operating costs and to better secure and improve banking infrastructure.
Turnover like this was expected from R3 who told the WSJ:
Developing technology like this requires dedication and significant resources, and our diverse pool of members all have different capacities and capabilities which naturally change over time.
It was just recently announced that Singapore Exchange is joining R3, becoming the first Asia-Pacific exchange to do so.