Inventors Brandon Matthew Castagna and Bethe Anne Warner published a patent assigned to Bank of America Corporation on June 6th, earlier this year, and while it is still under evaluation (pending), the Google patent doc gives us a clear look on what it's all about.

According to Google patent, the invention relates to improving the settlement of transactions among institutions, such as Banks, government organizations, and academia, under the title “Real-Time Net Settlement by Distributed Ledger System” (as filed Dec. 5, 2017).

Bank of America, among other international Banking institutions and Central Banks, understands that Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), not only can disrupt the current socioeconomic system and accounting, but it is also capable of providing real-time settlements instead of traditional End Of Day (EOD) settlements, trust, higher transaction rate, and transparency between users, while the need for physical accounting is completely eliminated.

The patent further aims to a decentralized, yet well pre-organized network that will serve as an encrypted interbank communication protocol, enabling instant verification of users and banking institutions committing to a transaction.

While Ripple's Distributed Ledger is mentioned several times in the document, there is not one single mention of XRP, Ripple's native currency, which empowers cheap and almost-instant digital asset transfers on a worldwide scale.

Why Ripple?

Now, on one hand, is kind of a centralized project, even if they're using a decentralized network - meaning that the operations of the company itself are determined by the respective Board of Directors, the CEO, etc - unlike traditional first-generation blockchain platforms such as Bitcoin, where the users of the network co-decide on what's to follow.

On the other hand, and that's the key point here, being centralized, Ripple managed to create trust between traditional monetary watchdogs, banking titans, and the crypto-community, as a central bank would never invest time, not to mention funds, into a project where the access to the 'red button' they're so used to overwatch, is absent.

Ripple is often called "The King of Partnerships" in the DLT scene, due to its ability to persuade government level organizations and monetary institutions all over the globe into the crypto gateway.

Some of these organizations who use Ripple's xRapid include, but are not limited to: several banking institutions, including central banks of Japan, and Korea, Western Union, MoneyGram, and now Bank of America (which apparently was under negotiations with Ripple since early 2018).

Obviously, Ripple was not the first blockchain platform to be working with the banking world, but it is the one that represents the Crypto-community and not a ghost corporate shell.

Competition

There are companies like IBM (Hyperledger), R3 (Corda), who provide DLT services to government level enterprises, including banking institutions like JP Morgans, ING, and HSBC among others, you'll not be able to read their full blockchain, identify their clients/users or view their transaction sums.

As a matter of fact, Bank of America's patent filing and all is great, but keep in mind that IBM has the most registered patents on a worldwide level, and also the most patents filed on DLTs.

In any case, we'll keep an eye on the development of the focusing patent and keep you updated on the matter.