Digital Asset is a financial technology company that builds products based on distributed ledger technology for regulated financial institutions, such as financial market infrastructure providers, CCPs, CSDs, exchanges, banks, custodians and their market participants. The company has raised $107.2 million in three rounds of funding.
Company
Digital Asset was founded in 2014 by Sunil Hirani and Don R. Wilson. Blythe Masters was named as CEO in March 2015. It is headquartered in New York City, USA with additional offices in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, Zurich and Budapest. It currently employs over 170 people. The board is composed of Michael Bodson, Cristóbal Conde, AG Gangadhar, Peter Hiom, Sunil Hirani, Tony James, Stephan Leithner, Sallie Krawcheck, Blythe Masters, George Nunn, Sanoke Viswanathan, and Don R. Wilson. To date, over $115M in funding has been raised from fifteen investors . The company claims strategic business relationships with Accenture, Broadridge, GFT, Google, IBM, IntellectEU and PwC.
History
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." September 2015: Company software was used in the US$5 million initial public offering of Pivit, a gaming company. January 2016: Selected by the Australian Securities Exchange to develop solutions for the Australian market with initial focus on post-trade services in the cash equities market. December 2017: ASX announced the decision to replace their Clearing House Electronic Subregister System, CHESS, with distributed ledger technology developed by Digital Asset. December 2018: The company announced that Blythe Masters is stepping down as CEO. March 2019: Yuval Rooz, former CTO and CFO is named CEO. Yuval was part of the founding team of Digital Asset. June 2019: Yuval Rooz announced that the company is pivoting to offer solutions focused on smart contracts rather than blockchain and DLT as such. November 2019: The ASX project to replace CHESS, its domestic settlement system, using DLT technology from Digital Asset remains on track. March 2020: ASX Delays CHESS project due to COVID, user feedback on timing, requested functionality changes, and the need for ASX to complete aspects of its own readiness.
The 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 DA Platform 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. Digital Asset also offers a cloud-based version of this technology, Digital Asset Modeling Language Platform-as-a-Service, which is available on the Google Cloud Platform. Digital Asset Modeling Language PaaS is a fully managed solution that developers can use to test and deploy DLT applications, accessible through Google Cloud’s Orbitera application marketplace.
