Digital Asset to launch Global Blockchain Network with Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, BNP and others

Financial technology firm Digital Asset plans to introduce a global privacy-enabled interoperable blockchain network curated to provide a decentralized infrastructure for institutional clients, the announcement was made on Tuesday. Participants in the network, which is also called the Canton Network, include companies such as 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 search for a solution that has the potential of blockchain while retaining the most primitive privacy specifications for institutional finance. According to Zuehlke, that 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 bring these together in a chain.

The network combines applications designed with Daml, Digital Asset’s smart contract language, while enabling multiple 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. Although Digital Asset provides and holds the technology that supports the infrastructure, the Daml smart contracts and the Canton protocol that allows applications, it does not own the network as it is owned by other participants that also include Digital Asset.

Founded in 2014, Digital Asset is a ledger technology development company 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 such as 7RIDGE, Elridge, Salesforce, Samsung, VMware, Accenture, Citi, Goldman Sachs, IBM and JPMorgan.

The company aims to create platforms and developer tools that use modern infrastructure to revolutionize the way companies communicate. The service offering is Daml, an application platform unfettered by organizational constraints where firms can design new multiparty solutions that transform contrasting silos into synchronized networks while eliminating latency and errors.

While the popular belief that the future of institutional finance revolves around blockchain and tokenization remains widespread, these efforts tend to create new siled blockchains. These silos are then addressed by distributed ledgers where interoperability is the solution to unlock the captivating possibility of composability and page mobility.

According to Saraniecki, the founder of Digital Asset, on a public blockchain, one must use the same set of validators and the data is also completely transparent, and is therefore a non-starter for a regulatory institution.

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