DLT developer Digital Asset, the founder of the Canton Network, is partnering with Ownera to improve interoperability and the distribution of tokenized assets. There will be a Canton Network node on the Ownera FinP2P routing network.
In the early days of enterprise blockchain, institutions collaborated in several consortia. Some of these have fallen by the wayside. Instead there are now many standalone DLTs launched by single institutions creating a new set of silos. That’s despite fragmentation being one of the key issues that blockchain aims to solve.
The Canton Network is one effort to address this, enabling interoperability between networks that adopted Digital Asset’s Canton technology. Some applications using Canton include Broadridge’s DLR repo and the DLTs of big banks such as Goldman Sachs’ GS DAP, HSBC’s Orion and the tokenization platform from BNP Paribas, although each DLT has to choose to opt in to the Canton Network. However, that doesn’t address interconnectivity with other blockchain technologies.
There’s an array of efforts to address blockchain interoperability. So far there’s a lack of consensus resulting in different DLT technologies using different interoperability solutions.
Ownera’s FinP2P
Ownera addresses this by offering a simple non-blockchain solution. Its FinP2P network is an old fashioned routing network that uses APIs. Anyone that connects to the network can (subject to permissions) connect to any other network on FinP2P. For example, to serve their clients, wealth managers might want to access tokens on various DLTs. A single connection to FinP2P makes that technically possible.
“The Canton Network has brought together the largest value of tokenized real-world assets of any network in the world,” said Yuval Rooz, co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset. “Extending the utility of these assets within Canton to complementary ecosystems of tokenized assets is key for users of Canton Network.”
Hence, by integrating Canton nodes with Ownera’s routers, buy side institutions and custodians get access to assets on the Canton network.
“With this partnership we can now offer our buy side and custody clients direct native access to the Canton network, and give Canton users access to additional distribution, liquidity, and services utilizing Ownera’s routers such as payment, custody, data, transfer agents, CSDs and more,” said Ami Ben David, founder and CEO of Ownera.
Rather than purely developing a technology solution, JP Morgan-backed Ownera created an ecosystem by courting the industry from the beginning through a collaboration with trade body Global Digital Finance (GDF). Recently the GDF created a working group with the FIX Trading Community, the FIX-FINP2P Protocol Interoperability Alliance.
