Tim Swanson, head of market research at R3, claims that the results of the London team’s research in distributed ledger will be presented to the public in the next 12 months, otherwise “people will walk away thinking this is a load of bumf.”

The R3 initiative aims to develop common standards and applications of the blockchain technology for the international fintech community. In November the total number of financial institutions partnering with R3 reached 30, including Barclays, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Commerzbank and others.

Tim Swanson, a research fellow at Singapore Management University and bitcoin technology advisor, joined R3 full-time this year. According to him, the biggest challenge working with banks in a blockchain project is to meet expectations and build a working platform as quickly as possible.

"Many banks feel they can reduce, or eliminate altogether, various costs, by adopting some sort of common shared ledger and let that proliferate through the industry," Mr Swanson told The Sydney Morning Herald Business Day.

"We feel the correct approach is to engage all the financial institutions from the getgo, otherwise you just recreate all these different little silos that can't communicate with each other, defeating a lot of the utility that comes from having this network," he told earlierIBTimes.co.uk.

Sonya Belova