Yes, banks are serious about the blockchain.

(What’s a blockchain? A blockchain is — well, see the three-minute video from Financial News below, which explains it using cartoon figures.)

SAN Innoventures, the venture arm of the Santander Group, one of the world’s largest banks, announced today that it has put $4 million into Ripple’s Series A funding round, which now totals $32 million.

Ripple is a San Francisco-based purveyor of open ledgers for tracking digital assets.

Last week, 13 banks joined the now 22-bank consortium with the mission to — as Matt Harris of Bain Capital Ventures put it — talk about the role of the blockchain in financial services. Santander, with the funding announced today, is doing something.

Santander is not a member of the blockchain consortium, which was organized by the “innovation firm” R3.

It should be noted that Ripple does not describe its ledgers as blockchains — Ripple’s technology is actually considerably faster and more efficient than that used by the bitcoin blockchain, but for the purpose of working within a financial institution, they have a great deal in common.

Ripple, formerly known as Ripple Labs, was an early leader in the movement to divorce bitcoin from the ledgers that tracked their transactions, as was, to its credit, Santander. As a highly distributed bank, a distributed ledger is of great interest to us, Julio Faura, head of R&D and Innovation at Santander, said at Consensus 2015 last month.

Smart contracts, which have the potential to simplify the process of verifying and enforcing contracts, and even, dare to dream, cutting some lawyers out of the process, are one of the areas of particular interest to Santander, Faura said.

Mariano Belinky, managing partner of Santander Innoventures, noted in a press release that Santander is “actively exploring where and how best to apply Ripple technology inside the bank. Ripple and Santander share a common vision of the future of the industry, and we intend to jointly advocate it in the community.”

As well as announcing the funding, Ripple introduced two new solutions for foreign exchange and currency exchange today.

Ripple, founded by online lending pioneer Chris Larsen, has more than $38 million in total funding. It was the first virtual currency company to be involved in a civil enforcement action, when FInCEN fined it $700,000 for allegedly having inadequate AML measures in place.