HSBC’s plan to move $20B in assets to blockchain could be a watershed moment

The investment bank’s trust of blockchain is likely to spur confidence in the nascent technology.

Investment bank HSBC Holdings is using a blockchain distributed ledger technology (DLT) to digitize transaction records of private investments, enabling clients globally to access the details of their assets online in near real-time.

The London-based company, the seventh largest bank in the world, plans to move $20 billion in assets that include equity, debt and real estate onto its new Digital Vault blockchain, a shift away from its current use of paper records to respond to client search requests.

By getting investors to interact with this data on the blockchain through decentralized applications (dApps) supported by friendly user interfaces, HSBC...