When the financial services industry started paying attention to blockchain technology, many companies, seemingly as a reflex, sought patent protection for their ideas.

Sudden jolts in the currency market may be becoming more frequent, with at least three flash crashes over the course of 14 months. But there is some hope in finding out their causes more quickly.

Deloitte is looking to diversify beyond its "bread and butter" of professional service firms.

One of the earliest bitcoin companies, Circle has attracted several rounds of investments and is beginning to diversify its strategic focus.

Stellar, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit organization and blockchain platform that connects banks and payments systems, has gone global with partnerships in India, the Philippines, Africa and Europe.

While there are a handful of payment pilots underway, the real benefit of blockchain for banks is a long-term proposition--and most early projects will be internal.

The bank consortium R3 CEV has released its Corda platform as open source to encourage innovation and interoperability in the industry's development of blockchain technology.

The Spanish banking giant Santander has withdrawn from the bank consortium R3 CEV, becoming the second defector from the blockchain group this week after Goldman Sachs.

Platforms designed for face-to-face or paper transactions may not be the best enabler of payments through connected devices, but a system born out of the digital payments world could fare better.

Open source development has joined blockchain technology in a bid to take a bite out of banks' long-standing control over the international payments market.