Some of the world’s largest investment banks are considering using bitcoin technology to revolutionise the $700 trillion global derivatives market.

Barclays, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are among the big investment banks to have begun exploring the potential of the “universal register” technology that underpins the digital currency as they look for ways to apply it to their multitrillion-dollar books of complex financial derivatives.

Banks have become interested in using the block chain system used by bitcoins that make it nearly impossible to create fake units of the digital currency, meaning that brokers and their counterparties could create a real-time record of who has what trade with whom.

The impact of this could be revolutionary given the millions of bilateral trades that big banks have