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In some countries, banks even banned any transactions connected to Bitcoin.

But lately, banks have been warming to the technology behind Bitcoin, called blockchain — using it to innovate, in fact — having recognized the advantages of the lightning-fast, decentralized transaction verification system as having broad applications for transactions involving everything from stock trades to money and property transfers.

“The concept is a network that guarantees the validity of a transaction,” said John Jason, a lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP, who testified at recent hearings by the Senate committee on banking, trade and commerce on digital currencies.

Bitcoin merely served as “proof” of that concept, he said. Now, it is being recognized that anything that plays a “trusted intermediary role” in today’s world “could be replaced by blockchain technology.”

That’s why Victor Dodig, chief executive of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, talked about blockchain during a recent speech in Toronto on the future of banking.

The banking business is largely based on trusted transactions between individuals, institutions and even governments. It’s a system that is built on banks as the trusted authorities required to verify and record them.

But blockchain has the potential to disrupt this with its “distributed ledger” approach that shares and quickly verifies transactions across a network of de-centralized computers. No middleman, such as a bank, is needed.