Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has dropped out of the R3 CEV LLC blockchain group. The investment bank was one of nine original members of R3, founded in 2014 to explore the use of the distributed database technology in Wall Street infrastructure.

The technology, best known for underpinning the system that trades the virtual currency bitcoin, has garnered increasing attention as a way banks can save billions of dollars and make old-fashioned processes faster and more efficient.

But...