Knabu: Our vision to build a fiat clearing bank for the Crypto community!We first wrote our initial draft of the Knabu whitepaper in September 2017, as a culmination of years of thought and often frustrating experiences in having our bank accounts closed or queried simply because we use or reference digital assets. At the same time, we kept observing bad actors, not just opaque banks with terrible customer service, but token projects which are scams and taint our otherwise credible token market.
In the years leading up to Knabu, we’ve had the privilege of seeing our space grow massively. Back in the day there were small bitcoin meetups where you knew everyone by name. Now there is a massive global sector with large industrial scale projects: from decentralised exchanges to blockchain software architecture to miners to blockchain gaming. New services and models are being created at an accelerating rate.
We are still excited, as when we first discovered Bitcoin, about how the technology can eliminate inefficiencies and help optimise the benefits of numerous industries.
What Is Knabu?In short, we are a blockchain technology company that has started the authorisation process to be a utility bank in the UK.
We want to enable innovators and future thought leaders to focus more on the quality and strength of their proposition. We will help them do that in two ways.
First, actors in the crypto economy should not have to worry about getting a business bank account or the stress of it being closed at short notice due to unjustified ‘risk’. Having an operational commercial bank account in our opinion is a basic right that should not be denied to crypto companies because they are doing something new. At the same time, the bank model is outdated. We are engineering our utility bank to use blockchain technology and build upon decentralised mechanisms that can remove inefficiencies that exist today.
What Is A Utility Bank?A utility bank is also known as a clearing bank. In the UK, clearing banks have settlement accounts with the Bank of England. The entire UK payment system settles across these Bank of England accounts. There are currently only seven clearing banks which are Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank and Clearbank.
In the last 250 years, there has only been one clearing bank to enter the UK market. We are looking to further break this monopoly and be the first blockchain technology company to be bring utility. We’ll do this as a B2B business, being being direct members of fiat payment schemes (eg Faster Payment and CHAPS). In addition to deposit taking and transaction processing of our own customers, we’ll facilitate the actual movement of money from one account to another between customers of other banks and payment service providers (PSPs).
Utility should be the order of the day in providing valuable services and helping the economy to grow. So we plan to introduce products and services which are blockchain aligned and which leverage the efficiencies of self clearing assets towards a universal settlement layer.
Looking Forward
We are continuing to work hard on development and our licensing process. We appreciate the very positive and encouraging engagement with UK regulators in this journey who have shared their deep interest in fintech with us.
You can find more information on us here:
All the best,
The Knabu Team
