# Banking on Blockchain: Costs Savings Thanks to the Blockchain Technology
## 1 Introduction
It could follow in the footsteps of Internet technology, in which the government, industry and academia, beginning with early research on packet switching and the ARPANET (the first network to use the Internet Protocol), contributed to the evolution and deployment of the technology that revolutionized the computer and communication world like nothing before. Blockchains have the potential to bring great value to several financial service activities, from trade finance to payments, securities settlement, and regulatory compliance. In addition, they could contribute to overcome some traditional banking inefficiencies, such as the foreign exchange (FX) transfer costs and times, to augment existing business networks, and to provide increased discoverability and trust working in cooperation with the banking payment and messaging systems. A key prerequisite to reach such an interconnected system is achieving a standard way of implementing this technology. In future, we may have multiple ledgers, such as a foreign exchange network and a bond network, which need interoperability to function, just as the internet and intranets share the same technology. Using blockchain in conjunction with actual banking systems will augment the power operating between counterparties. We potentially may have a common, ubiquitous blockchain, able to reduce the need for intermediaries to validate financial transactions and the friction created in financial networks due to different intermediaries, which often use different technology infrastructures. In theory, such an interconnected infrastructure has the potential to generate significant efficiency gains, reducing duplicative record keeping, eliminating reconciliation, minimising error rates and facilitating faster settlements (see work by [2]). In addition, such an infrastructure would also be critical to underpinning a future \"internet of things\". Every device connected to the internet becomes a potential user of banking services, and this infrastructure may enable offering services at much lower cost. Of course, blockchain mining protocols, at least as they look today, are not able to achieve the millisecond response times needed by transactions on the internet of things. A future blockchain with millisecond latency could give devices autonomy, and allow them, for example, to transfer ownership of physical goods without the need to refer to a central management system. Of course, there are many concerns about scalability, costs, and security to be overcome before blockchain technology moves to widespread usage. There is much concern about whether this technology will be able to achieve the processing speed of an automated clearing house, about the more computational power required to each participating block of a blockchain, and about the actual ability to lower costs compared to traditional payment systems when larger transaction volumes will be involved (see works by [2; 6]). In this paper, we focus on the role of financial and cryptocurrency markets in sustainable development, examining recent trends in banking sector, and possible future events that could shape the role of the blockchain technology in the sustainable development of an integrated financial and cryptocurrency market. We give significant insights about the efficiency of the actual Bitcoin system, showing that the efficiency of the Bitcoin system could increase only by overcoming some of its main limitations, such as the low number of transactions, the block size limit, and the high computational power. Many works provide food for thought about the potentialities of blockchain technology that if exploited and advanced in an adequate way could bring valid support to the actual financial system, such as the works quoted above [2; 6] and a recent report by [7] that estimated that blockchain based systems could bring high potential cost savings.