Commonwealth Bank has joined a consortium of international banks backing a project to develop a global standard of distributed ledger (blockchain) technology in financial markets, Finextra reports. Barclays, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, State Street, Royal Bank of Scotland, BBVA, UBS and CBA are working with US startup R3 to collaborate on research, design and engineering. The R3 team includes IBM's former head of blockchain technology Richard Brown. The banks will commit several million dollars of seed funding in coming months. Across the globe, banks are hitting their capital targets, the Wall Street Journal reports. Mostly, the banks have raised equity, rather than replacing risky assets with less risky ones. Most of the €1.7 trillion in capital raised has gone to the biggest banks, still among the most highly leveraged. All banks still hold zero capital against large books of government bonds. Also, in spite of fears about the growth of shadow banking, the total assets of large banks have grown by seven to 12 per cent since mid-2011. Standard & Poor's downgraded Japan's sovereign debt rating to A+ from AA-. "Despite showing initial promise, we believe that the government's economic revival strategy will not be able to reverse this deterioration in the next two to three years," S&P said.