The concept of a blockchain originated in 2009 with the digital currency bitcoin, but now Wall Street institutions are interested in blockchain technology without bitcoin.

RippleNet is a blockchain-like protocol for faster settlement of international payments. It launched in 2012 but its concept predates bitcoin. And it has added 75 banking clients already.

Ripple Labs announced on Wednesday it has signed 10 new banks from all over the world, including BBVA in Spain; MUFG in Japan; Akbank in Turkey; SEB in Sweden; and Axis Bank and Yes Bank, both in India. Add those 10 to the 47-bank consortium in Japan that implemented Ripple in March. And add those 57 to existing big-name clients like Bank of America, RBC, Standard Chartered and UBS, and RippleNet starts to look like it’s gaining traction very quickly.

“Our pace [of signing new clients] has dramatically increased,” says Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse. “I also think people are getting more comfortable with blockchain technologies. It’s no longer a science experiment. It’s not theory, it’s very real.”

The bitcoin blockchain is a decentralized, public, permissionless ledger that records every transaction and trade done in bitcoin. But now all manner of companies, from “blockchain as a service” startups like Ripple and Chain to established tech giants like IBM, are developing all manner of distributed ledgers for areas like food shipment tracking, smart contracts, and agriculture.

In many cases these applications of blockchain are closed and permissioned, which is a very different proposition than the spirit of the anonymized, open-to-all bitcoin blockchain. In banking, for now, the main appeal is to improve the efficiency of their transaction processing.

View photos From the Ripple web site More

Why banks are gravitating to Ripple

Ripple’s value proposition to banking clients is cheaper rates and faster transfer times for international payments. The bank’s customers don’t have to know or care that they’re using Ripple (it isn’t like you’d tell your bank, “I want to send this money using Ripple”), but would certainly notice the faster transaction time than they’re used to.

Garlinghouse gives the pitch to banks this way: “If your customer wants to send yen to Japan, you are captive to the correspondent banking network and your customer has a bad experience and you, as a bank, have to endure cost to transmit that money.”

Ripple’s Consensus Ledger can process 1,000 transactions per second, and settles an international payment in three seconds on average. (He compares that to the bitcoin blockchain, which has slowed recently to two hours per transaction, creating a debate over block size; to be fair, both speeds are much faster than sending money with a traditional clearinghouse like Western Union.)

Ripple can also be used for in-country payments; many of the banks in Japan are using Ripple for domestic payments due to the sluggishness of the local payments network there. But for the most part, Ripple is focusing on cross-border payments because that’s the biggest pain point for banks and banking customers.

Santander added a function to its mobile app that lets customers send money abroad over the Ripple network. While Ripple is hardly the only blockchain-for-banking startup out there, Garlinghouse boasts, “We are the only company in the space with real customers.” Competitors, Garlinghouse says, “are still playing in the sandbox. And proof of concepts are not a business model.”

That’s tough talk, and true only to an extent. Chain has partnered with heavy-hitters like Visa, Citi, and Nasdaq, but for now the results have been experiments, trial runs, or “previews” like Visa B2B Connect.

All the experimentation has led critics to say that the Wall Street interest in blockchain is all just talk, or as IBM blockchain exec Jerry Cuomo puts it, “blockchain tourism.” Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas acknowledges that the term itself has become a “classic technology buzzword.”

But Garlinghouse is confident that distributed ledger technology and its many applications will bring about the “Internet of value.” Many have applied that phrase to bitcoin (causing some contention over who owns the phrase), but Garlinghouse says it hasn’t lived up to that promise.