It was standing room only in the overflow theatre and jam packed in the designated bubble for the key forum for the "Innotribe" (innovation) stream on the first day of SWIFT's Sibos convention in Singapore yesterday."New kids on the Block(chain) platform" was the theme for the session, which drew crowds that later queued for an equally congested session on "The future of payments".Distributed ledger technology (which fosters bitcoins, for one) is progressing from a fad to a fixture of the industry, if the eagerness to deepen understanding is any gauge at SWIFT's annual get together - a "sales fiesta turned on-the-job university" for bankers with a yen for IT."Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology, is the number one topic in banking and the fintech community for the last couple of months, along with behavioural analytics and robo wealth advice," Lawrence Wintermeyer, chief executive of the UK's collaboration association' Innovate Finance, said on the sidelines of Sibos yesterday."It just landed at the right time," he said, giving some context to the escalating fascination with the concept."It's just peaked in the last 60 days to 90 days. In the corporate environment there's a lot of bilateral and multilateral projects going on to test it. There's a lot of prototypes."Wintermeyer said: "bankers and insurers are concerned. Blockchain in financial services and other industries offers great promise. There's an indelible or immutable record and a cypher shake in each transaction; it offers an elegant solution."While chiefly associated with payments applications, other uses are hot topics."Settlement in a few seconds - it's possible," declared Oliver Bussmann, a group managing director at UBS, referring to securities.Bussmann also took a moderate view on the timeline for this technology to leave its mark. "Banking in one hundred years will be massively disrupted," Bussmann said, nominating a time at last ten times longer than the prevailing view in a Sibos straw poll of attendees at the second session.Simon Taylor, vice president for Blockchain research at Barclays cautioned the crowd: "The fact this room is full does not mean your job is changing tomorrow, but if you take your eye off this thing you are in trouble."