aaamusic | On 02, Sep 2021

There are ideas that I have been waiting for a long time. Just as it is normal for a fruit retailer to add new fruit to its range, it should be obvious for a bank to bring new currencies and transaction systems into their online environment. So far, however, the interest of banks in cryptocurrencies has been extremely limited. In the best – very best – case, they have hesitantly begun to approach Bitcoin and other coins as an investment product in recent years. 

It is possible that this will change in the near future. Because the Dutch Rabobank seems to have taken a first step to integrate a wallet for crypto currencies into their online platform. As part of an internal innovation program (Google Translator) called “Moonshot”, the bank’s employees have developed various ideas to meet customer requirements. One of 22 ideas that are in the running is Rabobit – an online wallet for cryptocurrencies that is to become part of the bank’s online environment. The team is currently evaluating whether the customer is interested. At the end of March it will be decided whether Rabobit will be shortlisted for the projects to be implemented. 

Confusingly, there is already a website called Rabobit.nl, which offers an online wallet for cryptocurrencies on behalf of the bank. It promises to store crypto currencies in a wallet in the secure environment of the bank, to have bank and crypto accounts in the same place, to simply add crypto currencies to the banking apps that are already in use and to be able to use the coins directly from the bank account. Anyone who tries to register, however, apparently only ends up on the e-mail distribution list at first. This suggests that the site was set up to evaluate customer interest and not, as some fear, a scam. The big news in the world of crypto was that Tesla refuses cryptocurrency, in more detail by https://bitcoindata.org/tesla_turns_away_from_bitcoin/, but as it seems to us, this is not the end of Tesla’s work with the crypto world.

Rabobank has already written an article about cryptocurrencies in the past . When exactly is not stated on the website. For a bank, the institute expressed itself extremely positively about Bitcoin and Co. back then: “We are currently experiencing the beginning of a new phenomenon which, according to experts and investors, can be compared with the Internet of the 1990s. The creation of user-friendly applications has only just begun. We see this more as an opportunity than a threat […] The old and the new world will have to get closer to each other. ”

Rabobank is the second largest bank with 7.4 million Dutch customers the Netherlands. Until the beginning of 2016 it was still an association of local cooperative banks, after which the 106 cooperatives merged to form one large cooperative. Rabobank is primarily active in the private customer business, but also as a financial service provider in the agricultural and food industries.The gigantic potential there is if Rabobank brings Bitcoin or other crypto currencies to its millions of customers does not need to be specifically mentioned.