Digital Asset to Start Global Blockchain Network with Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, BNP and Others

Digital Asset, which is a financial technology firm, plans to introduce a global privacy-enabled interoperable blockchain network curated to offer a decentralized infrastructure for institutional clients, the announcement for which was made on Tuesday. Participants of the network, which is also called the Canton Network, include companies like BNP Paribas, Deloitte, Cboe Global Markets, Goldman Sachs, Broadridge, S&P Global, and Microsoft among others.

According to Chris Zuehlke, partner at DRW and global head of Cumberland, the Canton Network is a strong key to the industry’s quest for a solution that harbors the potential of blockchain while retaining the most primitive privacy specifications for institutional finance. According to Zuehlke, the out-of-the-box approach to looking at the problem, while combining it with the ability to process an atomic transaction via multiple smart contracts, makes it the building block needed to gather these on a chain.

The network combines applications designed with Daml, Digital Asset’s smart contract language while enabling several systems in financial marketplaces to communicate and synchronize.

According to Jens Hachmeister, head of Issuer services and new digital markets at Deutsche Borse Group, solutions like these have the potential to become building blocks for future virtual and distributed financial market establishments. Even though Digital Asset offers and holds the technology backing the infrastructure, the Daml smart contracts, and the Canton protocol that allows for applications, it does not own the network as it is owned by other participants that also include Digital Asset.

Digital Asset, which was founded in 2014, is a company that develops ledger technology aimed at building distributed, encrypted straight-through processing tools. This is a New-York based company established by Don Wilson, Eric Saraniecki, Sunil Hirani, and Yoval Rooz. Digital Asset is backed by strategic investors like 7RIDGE, Elridge, Salesforce, Samsung, VMware, Accenture, Citi, Goldman Sachs, IBM, and JPMorgan.

The firm aims at creating platforms and developer tools that utilize modern infrastructure to revolutionize the way companies communicate. Its service offering is Daml, an application platform that is not restrained by organizational limitations where firms can design new multi-party resolutions that alter contrasting silos into synchronized networks while removing latency and errors.

While the popular belief that the future of institutional finance spins around blockchain and tokenization is still prevalent, these efforts tend to create new siloed blockchains. These silos are then addressed by distributed ledgers wherein interoperability is the solution to unlocking the captivating possibility of composability and collateral mobility.

According to Saraniecki, the founder of Digital Asset, on a public blockchain, one has to use the same set of validators and the data is also completely transparent, hence are non-starters for a regulatory-compliant institution.