Polybius Foundation launched this year as an Estonian-registered financial services firm. The company says Polybius Bank will be the \"first bank in the world to specialize in financial services for cr
Polybius Foundation launched this year as an Estonian-registered financial services firm. The company says Polybius Bank will be the "first bank in the world to specialize in financial services for cryptocurrency startups and blockchain projects." The bank will operate online and serve both the crypto industry and general consumers, with plans to pursue EU financial institution licensing and build a platform merging traditional banking, blockchain, Internet-of-Things infrastructure, and data analytics.
The startup occupies similar terrain as BABB App Ltd., the London firm developing a banking application on Ethereum. BABB taps biometrics, Big Data, and artificial intelligence to serve individuals and small businesses. Both ventures are racing to digitize banking.
Polybius Bank intends to roll out standard banking products—savings accounts, loans, debit cards—alongside services designed for the crypto crowd. The bank will extend credit backed by cryptocurrency holdings and help users assemble investment portfolios built on digital assets. In April, Polybius inked a memorandum with Attic Lab, a Ukrainian startup, to adopt Attic's OpenBankIT blockchain system for processing payments. CryptoPay, HashCoins, and AmbiSafe have joined the project's early roster.
Ivan Turygin, Polybius's co-founder and chairman, frames the mission around two converging forces: shifting customer expectations and the fintech explosion. Phone biometrics have matured. Fingerprints, voice data, and camera-based face recognition exist on billions of devices worldwide. These tools, Turygin argues, reshape how banks can identify users. "A phone contains all the tools for 100% guaranteed user identification: fingerprint, voice recognition, and facial recognition using the camera," he said.
Polybius's ambition stretches beyond payments and loans. The firm wants to construct what Turygin calls the "ultimate financial infrastructure, sort of a 'financial Google.'" He elaborated: "[It] will not only simplify and reduce the costs of finance management for the people, but will also become a vital part of all aspects of their daily life, while at the same time providing them maximum control over their data."
Central to that vision sits Digital Pass, a blockchain-based remote identification service and personal data storage system that HashCoins engineered. Polybius describes it as an "automation and digitalization ecosystem" granting individuals and companies access to financial, industrial, and other services through a single digital credential. The firm wants Digital Pass to function as the "universal all-European counter digital ID," a more efficient and versatile alternative to traditional government-issued identity cards. The system stores personal information—credit histories, medical records, private files—across a distributed blockchain that state and commercial organizations recognize as equivalent to a classical ID. Users control what information they disclose to whom.
