The effort to combine the crypt industry with conventional banking is the latest impulse from Binance, whose CEO Changpeng Zhao announced last week that the platform expects its profit to rise from $500 million to $1 billion in 2018.
Binance and other promoters of the Maltese blockchain project stressed that they were planning to transform the startup into the first decentralised and Community bank in the world, provided that they had obtained the necessary permits, namely a licence from the regulatory authorities in Malta, a member of the European Union and approval from the European Central Bank.
However, there is no need to worry about the support of the Maltese people. Silvio Schembri, Junior Minister for Financial Services, Digital Economy and Innovation in the Office of the Prime Minister of Malta, said:
“We are honored to have been chosen as the first global bank owned by the community.
As the Minister said, the bank will not be owned by a single organisation or corporation. Instead, the bank will belong to the customers who will have influence on the directions of development of new solutions.
Marc Oswald, global strategist at ADM Investor Services International in London, summarized: