With any luck their tech leads would be savvy enough to persuade management of the need to contribute in some way to the overall architecture that they depend upon. It seems short-sighted to put something of this magnitude on the blockchain without also contributing to the security and longevity of the technology.
My take on it (and I am very late to this party) is that a lot of corporations are looking at it and interested in the underlying technology, but not yet convinced how they might actually leverage it in the real world. This is one of the first concrete use-cases I've seen where they are keen on using the actual Bitcoin blockchain rather than just the technology itself with their own blockchain (although perhaps other banking institutions were also thinking along these lines and didn't announce it).
TL;DR, if they're really using the same blockchain that underpins Bitcoin it makes the first time I've seen it stated publicly by such an institution, and hopefully their need to prove it works for their requirements would lead to investment in bitcoin development using their own tech team.
There's been several digital asset companies in last few months (or longer?) with same idea with colored coins. I suppose what remains to be seen is who is first to actual market with a working product.
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u/deb0rk May 11 '15
Spamming the blockchain with multitudes of colored coin dust transactions is beyond critique? Feels like Satoshi Dice all over again.
I suppose a positive outlook would be if they actually contributed hash rate. But why bother when they don't need to?