Last week, Standard Bank South Africa CEO Lungisa Fuzile outlined a cautious approach towards cryptocurrencies, speaking to Bloomberg.

“We move with the world, but you don’t want to be the leader in some of these things,” Fuzile said. “You want to be fast followers.” He added: “We handle our scans with care.”

That may be a sign of the times with crypto winter because Standard has been a leader in the past. In 2021 he joined the governing council of the public Hedera DLT, which has its own HBAR crypto token. We suspect that this was the first bank in the world to participate in the governance of a public blockchain.

Given the timing, the price then was around 13 cents and now it’s five cents, you would have taken a hit to your token holdings, even though the numbers probably aren’t important to a bank. While joining a public DLT may seem risky, the other members of the governing council at the time included Google, IBM, Nomura, and FIS/Worldpay, among other big names. However, Standard was the first bank.

That year it participated in a cross-border stablecoin trial with Korea’s Shinhan Bank, which joined Hedera a couple of months after the South African bank. Shinhan recently completed another stablecoin test that included a Taiwanese bank and a subsidiary of Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank, but Standard Bank was not mentioned.

Meanwhile, the head of Fuzile, the group’s CEO Sim Tshabalala, recently spoke about the central bank digital currency. He expressed concern about competing with the central bank.

The bank has also been involved in various blockchain-based trade finance platforms, including with China’s ICBC bank (a major shareholder) and Contour. He was also a participant in the extinct Marco Polo platform.