VIDEO | How digital-asset platforms can be made interoperable, with each other and with “TradFi”, was discussed as BNY Mellon’s Abhay Navale was interviewed by Olaf Ransome in a virtual Helsinki “fireside chat” on Wednesday afternoon.
As Global Head of Digital Assets Technology with BNY Mellon, Abhay Navale led the “hackathon” team that came to win Swift’s recent challenge on digital-asset interoperability. Its solution was produced against the background that financial firms are seeking faster transactions at lower cost, and asset managers will require legal certainty that their asset purchases are final and irrevocable.
As technology continues to evolve, alongside the rise of digital currencies, and 24/7 instant commerce, the ability to solve the global interoperability puzzle for digital assets becomes increasingly difficult. In the video, learn from Abhay how BNY Mellon works to develop a seamless client experience for digital and traditional assets.
The BNY Mellon hackathon team, of 10 people across 5 countries, was well warmed up at start – having set up the company’s digital-asset custody platform, which has gone live this autumn.
“So as a starting point, we used everything that we learned while building the platform, and applied those learnings to to some of these real world issues around the interoperability,” Abhay Navale explains.
Abhay Navale describes his team’s solution as a set of necessary building blocks:
• An escrow function makes it possible to safekeep an asset, while enabling so called atomic settlement when market participants trade the digitally issued claims on it.
• Support for multiple exchanges and multiple owners must be in place.
• A secure messaging network is needed – but was not build from scratch, as this is where the team recognised the utility of Swift’s existing messaging infrastructure.
• A utility in the style of ISIN (the securities identifier catalogue), serving users with necessary data.
Session moderator Olaf Ransome is founder of 3C Advisory LLC.
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