CEO Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie said in an interview with CoinDesk that BCB Group is a payments processor connecting crypto. businesses to the banking system are accelerating plans to add U.S. dollar capabilities to fill the gap left by the recently shut down Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN).
In Europe, BCB, based in London, offers fiat-to-crypto rails for currencies like sterling, euros, Swiss francs, and yen, mainly to institutional players like Bitstamp, Galaxy Digital, Gemini, and Kraken. BCB was the first cryptocurrency company to receive a payments license from the U.K. regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
For cryptocurrency businesses—many of which see the transformation of conventional finance as their ultimate objective—banking has been a contentious topic. Regulators in the United States have reacted haphazardly to recent crashes and scandals, leading to what could be described as a choke point operation on crypto banking, at least as far as Silvergate is concerned.
In the middle of 2020, BCB established the BCB Liquidity Interchange Network Consortium (BLINC), its fast settlement network. It is a real-time gross settlement system that performs for dollars, British pounds, Swiss francs, and other major currencies, which SEN did for major crypto clients in the United States until recently.
It’s important to note that the counterpart of SEN, Signet from NYC-based Signature Bank, is now the second-largest network for USD quick settlement and could help meet some of the demand. Nonetheless, a BLINC dollar component has been planned. Yet, a BLINC dollar component has been developing for nearly a year and is poised to deploy, according to Landsberg-Sadie.
“Certainly, I’m going to try and bring it forward as quickly as possible,” he stated about the news that Silvergate’s network is no longer running. With the significant client overlap between BCB and Silvergate, we’ll go to all lengths to ensure individuals who SEN leaves behind to have some continuity.
According to Landsberg-Sadie, the main distinction between BLINC and SEN is that the former is multicurrency and unattached to a specific financial institution, such as Silvergate or Signature Bank. He continued by saying that while it had been created as a payment institution with onramps to several banks in countries including the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Europe, it was not intended to accept deposits.
The model is decentralized, according to Landsberg-Sadie. “What you have with Silvergate and Signature is a credit institution solution used to solve an issue involving payments. When Silvergate permitted long-term bitcoin wagers against short-term cash deposits, an impossible position to unwind in 2022’s volatile markets, problems began to arise. BLINC funds are always exactly 1:1 with monies that have been secured without being leveraged or rehypothecated.
