Digital Asset Holdings

Digital Asset Holdings, LLC (or Digital Asset) is a financial technology company that builds products based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) for regulated financial institutions, such as financial market infrastructure providers, CCPs, CSDs, exchanges, banks, custodians and their market participants^[1].

1 Digital Asset Holdings Review
- 1.1 Main information
- 1.2 Digital Asset Blockchain and Bitcoin technology
2 History
3 Digital Asset Platform
4 Software, Stock and Security Projects
5 Digital Asset company and banks
6 See also
7 External links
8 References

Digital Asset Holdings Review

Digital Asset Holdings LLC, a software company, develops and builds distributed ledger technology solutions for the financial services industry. Its software maps business logic and legal processes to cryptographic signature flows, as well as commits transactions to private or public distributed ledgers or traditional databases depending on the requirements of the use case. The company offers its software for various market segments, such as loans, securities, derivatives, and foreign exchange. It serves various customers, including banks, dealers, exchanges, central securities depositories, custodians, central clearing counterparties, and other critical infrastructure providers worldwide.

Research Digital Asset Holdings are in the technology unit of the blockchain to protect the whole system. Blythe masters hopes to take a look at the first commercial use of development results based on a distributed registry at the end of 2016. But for this technology to spread and people to hear about it, it will take a very long time.

Main information

Name: Digital Asset Holdings, LLC
Country: United States
Headquarter: New York
Type: Financial Services
Product: Financial technology software
Estimated valuation: $67.2 million
Date: 22-Jan-2016
Investors: ABN AMRO, Accenture, ASX Limited, BNP Paribas, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Citi, CME Ventures, Deutsche Börse Group, ICAP, J.P. Morgan, Santander InnoVentures, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), and The PNC Financial Services Group Inc.
White paper: link

Digital Asset Blockchain and Bitcoin technology

The company is seeking to use the underlying technology of Bitcoins to streamline financial transactions and make them faster, safer and cheaper. The company does not function as an exchange or trading platform in and of itself but will provide software to its customers that will improve the quality of financial trades. Bitcoin technology is driven by the block chain, which is a decentralized ledger that stores information permanently and is driven by cryptography. Digital Asset’s mission is to supply this technology to its customers so that they can reduce transaction costs and settle their trades more quickly. The technology can facilitate settlements between traditional and digital currencies. The software program maps business logic and legal processes into cryptographic signature flows. It also commits transactions to public or private distributed ledgers and traditional databases depending upon what is needed.

Blythe masters is the Creator of a startup based on blockchain technology, Digital Asset Holdings, where she became CEO in March. She worked for 27 years in JPMorgan Chase, where she held senior positions, the last was the position of head of the Bank’s unit for work with raw materials 2007-2014. She was also the chief financial officer of the investment Bank, and worked to reduce credit risks in the largest Bank in the world.

Digital Asset was founded in 2014 by Sunil Hirani and Don R. Wilson, and Blythe Masters was named as CEO in March 2015^[2]. It is headquartered in New York City, USA with additional offices in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Zurich and Budapest. It currently employs over 130 people.

The board is composed of Michael Bodson, Cristobal Conde, Peter Hiom, Sunil Hirani, Sallie Krawcheck, Ashwin Kumar, Blythe Masters, George Nunn, Sanoke Viswanathan, and Don R. Wilson. ^[3]

To date, over $115M in funding has been raised from fifteen investors (ABN Amro, Accenture, Australian Securities Exchange, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citi, CME Group, Deutsche Börse Group, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Goldman Sachs, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, NEX, PNC Financial Services, and Banco Santander). The company has strategic business relationships with Accenture, Broadridge, IBM and PwC to help scale and accelerate the adoption and deployment its technology.

Startup Digital Asset Holdings presented a platform for financial markets that allows traders to use blockchain technology without disclosing confidential information.

As representatives of the startup said, the new product will introduce blockchain technology in those industries where disclosure of information by market participants can give an advantage to their competitors. The new platform solves the problem of confidentiality by dividing the register into two streams, one of which participants can store non-public details, and the second one publishes all other transaction data. The platform was based on its own startup development, designed for financial institutions such as the Australian stock exchange and the US Postal service. Implementation of the platform will be carried out under the contract to replace the settlement and clearing system of the Australian stock exchange on blockchain software. It is expected to be available for commercial use from the beginning of 2018.

History

Digital Asset Holdings raises $40 million

June 2015: The company acquired Bits of Proof, which had developed an enterprise-grade implementation of blockchain server security tools.

June 2015: The company acquired Hyperledger, which had developed a permissioned distributed ledger that did not requiring native cryptocurrency, and was designed specifically for financial institutions. ^[4] On June 25, 2015 the Moneybeat column from The Wall Street Journal wrote that the “acquisition of HyperLedger might raise eyebrows in the bitcoin community, where there is aversion to the idea that Wall Street might co-opt blockchain technology and strip it of its decentralized nature.” In 2016 the company donated the Hyperledger name to the Linux Foundation. ^[5]

September 2015: Company software was used in the US$5 million initial public offering of Pivit, a gaming company.

October 2015: The company acquired Blockstack.io, which had developed a blockchain-as-a-service offering for financial institutions to develop and test applications using Blockstack’s APIs and SDK.

January 2016: Selected by the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) to develop solutions for the Australian market with initial focus on post-trade (clearing and settlement) services in the cash equities market.

March 2016: Selected by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) to develop and test a proof of concept for managing the clearing and settlement of U.S. Treasury, Agency, and Agency Mortgage-Backed repurchase agreement (repo) transactions.

April 2016: The company acquired Elevence, which had developed a domain specific language to safely and securely model and execute complex financial agreements with certainty and finality, while preserving data confidentiality.

September 2016: Signed an agreement with SIX Securities Services to develop a prototype for securities lifecycle processing. ^[6]

December 2017: ASX announced the decision to replace their Clearing House Electronic Subregister System, CHESS, with distributed ledger technology developed by Digital Asset.

Digital Asset Platform

The company’s primary offering is the Digital Asset Platform, a common foundation on which financial services applications can be built using DLT to mutualize market infrastructure across distinct market participants while maintaining confidentiality and scalability. Participants in the platform share a single source of truth which provides continuous data integrity, any desired or mandated degree of transparency and the opportunity for rapid innovation.

The Platform includes Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML); a domain specific language that enforces consistent interpretation and application of business logic, and provides a real-time, auditable log of ordered evidences of events. These evidences are cryptographically linked to private trade data that is replicated selectively among only those parties entitled to view or interact with it. By combining a network-wide, replicated DLT log and partially replicated reference data, each participant can create their subsection of the ledger with full confidence that it is consistent with that of other parties.

An overview of the Digital Asset Platform can be found in a non-technical whitepaper published by the company in December 2016.

ASX said it “has an option to participate in the [latest] fundraising” after it announces in December whether it will use DAH’s technology. “In the meantime, it’s pleasing that DAH’s growth plans continue to be strongly supported,” the company added.

DAH is also working with DTCC, the main US clearing house, to use its technology for speeding up settlement of repurchase agreements, or “repos”, which are used by financial institutions to raise trillions of dollars in short-term financing.

Switzerland’s SIX Securities Services has hired DAH to develop a “proof of concept” for using its technology to improve efficiency in “securities lifecycle processing” in the country’s financial markets.

Software, Stock and Security Projects

Digital Asset has publicly announced three projects:

Australian Securities Exchange (ASX): ASX selected Digital Asset as a technology partner to develop, test and demonstrate to ASX a working prototype of a post-trade platform for the cash equity market using DLT. Following the success of the prototype, ASX entered into an agreement for Digital Asset to develop a CHESS (Clearing House Electronic Subregister System) DLT-based replacement candidate. In December 2017 ASX formalized a decision to move forward with the replacement of CHESS with distributed ledger technology developed by Digital Asset^[7].

Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC): DTCC contracted Digital Asset to develop a clearing and settlement solution for repurchase agreement (repo) transactions. The goal is to reduce risk and capital requirements for the repo market by enabling DTCC’s Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) to become the settlement counterparty in real-time.

SIX Securities Services (SIX): SIX Securities Services selected Digital Asset to develop a prototype that demonstrates the commercial viability of DLT across the Swiss financial market. The initial phase was to build a prototype for securities lifecycle processing using the Digital Asset Platform.

Digital Asset company and banks

The banks have developed a contradictory attitude towards bitcoin. On the one hand, they are still intrigued by technology, but on the other hand, they have serious concerns caused by negative associations; now that Wall Street is interested in technology, everything must change.

The placement of shares was carried out in cooperation with the New-York-based Case company, which develops ultra-secure hardware wallets, and the London-based bitcoin company Elliptic. This was done in order to ensure that digital assets will remain under the control of Pivit and investors.

Thus, the startup Digital Asset Holdings joined the group of companies competing in the development of the product, which will be based on the technology of distributed registers. It is reported that Digital Asset Holdings plans to develop more goods and services, and the continuation of the sale of shares on other blockchains. Thus, Blythe masters entered the technical bitcoin race, making Digital Asset Holdings the first company on wall Street to announce the placement of the crypto-shares

External links

Digital Asset Holdings website
Twitter
Digital Asset Holdings White Paper

Digital Asset Holdings

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