I wonder how many of these banks think they're using blockchain, and put out press releases stating that, because the engineers have lied to management in order to get projects underway.

Matt Levine has been speculating on this a lot recently: banks traditionally have hugely underinvested in infrastructure upgrades. I imagine if you're in IT at a bank, it must be awfully tempting to go "blockchain! secret project!" to get management on board because the suits are all caught up in the hype. Then you can just immediately pivot to Apache Cassandra (which is strictly superior to blockchain in pretty much every proposed business use of blockchain I've ever seen) and no one's the wiser.