The fintech start-up DrumG which started in August 2017, has received a $6.5m investment from blockchain firm ConsenSys. The company plans to develop blockchain products for the financial services sector. Even though ConsenSys is a major backer, the company is blockchain agnostic. Hence they plan to select the best blockchain protocol for each application.
ConsenSys was the sole investor in this funding round. Joseph Lubin, ConsenSys founder and CEO, will also serve on DrumG’s Board of Directors. CEO Tim Grant previously headed up R3 Labs and will continue to work with Corda when appropriate.
Grant said: “We are delighted to welcome an industry luminary in the form of Joe Lubin onto our Board of Directors and to have the opportunity to engage with the significant group of professionals and global resources that make up ConsenSys.”
Joseph Lubin is similarly enthusiastic: “We are excited to partner with DrumG Technologies as a strategic investor and as a part of our broad portfolio of activity in the enterprise distributed ledger space.”
DrumG’s Details
Currently, DrumG has offices in Bermuda, New York, London, and Singapore.
It also boasts an experienced 20-strong team, comprising of employees from UBS, Barclays, J.P. Morgan, Bloomberg, IBM, PwC, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, and others.
Rather than building their own blockchain, DrumG will develop solutions on other DLT protocols and platforms.
To develop best in class solutions, the start-up operates on a ‘“ledger appropriate” philosophy’. This means the firm assesses more than ten enterprise-grade DLT protocols’ and chooses the most applicable for each of its projects.
Right now, DrumG has two projects in development, one operating on Ethereum and the other on R3’s Corda.
Titanium Network
The Ethereum based project, called the Titanium Network, aims to provide a decentralized, secure and anonymous Over the Counter (OTC) trading platform for investment banks. The project is supported by Credit Suisse, and its main goals are to be faster, cheaper and more capable than current solutions.
Furthermore, OTC centralized operators tightly control data management often forcing institutions to buy back their data. Hence, this solution wants to return control of data to OTC trading participants so they can avoid these costs and risks.
DrumG expects the system to go live in Q2 2019.
Emmanuel Aidoo, Head of Distributed Ledger Technology Strategy at Credit Suisse said: “We are excited to work with the DrumG team and serve as a founding institution for the Titanium Network which will build the next generation OTC securities consensus pricing service. We look forward to welcoming other financial institutions to the Titanium Network.”
Post Trade
The second unnamed solution is a post-trade reconciliation network. This will provide hedge funds, fund administrators and auditors a permissioned database of transactions. DrumG says that there are other industry players involved but has so far provided no names.
David E. Rutter, Founder and CEO at R3, said, “We are very familiar with the DrumG team and value its track record in the enterprise financial services space, as well as its strong foundation in enterprise blockchain. We look forward to continuing our partnership with DrumG and to building business networks on the R3 Corda Enterprise platform.”
