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When Citi Ventures launched its accelerator with Plug and Play, the San Francisco build-an-accelerator outfit, last December, the Citigroup investment arm said it was doing so “to [accelerate] emerging technologies that have the potential to transform financial services experiences for Citi’s customers.”

Those “emerging technologies,” however, appear to be skewing to those related to bitcoin and/or the distributed ledger.

An article on bitcoin in The Wall Street Journal published Sunday states that “USAA and Citigroup’s venture capital arm, Citi Ventures, are also doing mentoring work with startups at an accelerator program run by San Francisco’s Plug and Play Tech Center.” The implication is that Plug and Play Fintech, as it is called, has a distinct focus on bitcoin and the distributed ledger.

Indeed, the director of Plug and Play Fintech, which will accept its first startups soon, is Scott Robinson, who is also director of — you guessed it — Plug and Play Bitcoin, the accelerator’s bitcoin-centric venture. Further, Plug and Play already boasts nine fintech companies in its portfolio: six are bitcoin related. One of the Plug and Play bitcoin startups, 37Coins, has had talks with Citi Ventures officials. 37Coins is “scheduled to begin working directly with the team from Citi Ventures in a few weeks,” the company’s founder said last week.

Plug and Play Fintech makes pains to point out that it has no specific focus within financial services. But the WSJ article makes plain that several major banks are diving into distributed-ledger startups, not least of them, apparently, Citi. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers was quoted prominently in the article as saying this:

The price of handling bits [of data] has come down by a factor of 10,000-fold over the last generation; it’s high time that the costs of payments processing fall by a factor of even two. Bitcoin offers the prospect of necessary and important disruption in finance for the benefit of buyers and sellers rather than financiers and middlemen.

It appears that Citi has heard Summers’s call.