Digital Asset Holdings

Digital Asset (or Digital Asset Holdings, LLC) is a financial technology company that builds products based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) 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.[1]

Digital Asset
IndustryBlockchain
FounderDon R. Wilson Sunil Hirani
Headquarters
New York City
,
United States
Area served
Global
Websitedigitalasset.com

Company

Digital Asset was founded in 2014 by Sunil Hirani and Don R. Wilson. Blythe Masters was named as CEO in March 2015.[2][3][4][5][6] 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.[7][8]

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.[9][10]

To date, over $115M in funding has been raised from fifteen investors (ABN Amro, Accenture, Australian Securities Exchange, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citi, CME Group, Deutsche Börse Group, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, Goldman Sachs, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, NEX, PNC Financial Services, and Banco Santander). The company claims strategic business relationships with Accenture, Broadridge, GFT, Google, IBM, IntellectEU and PwC.[11][12]

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."[13]

September 2015: Company software was used in the US$5 million initial public offering of Pivit, a gaming company.[14][15]

January 2016: Selected by the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) to develop solutions for the Australian market with initial focus on post-trade (clearing and settlement) services in the cash equities market.[16]

December 2017: ASX announced the decision to replace their Clearing House Electronic Subregister System, CHESS, with distributed ledger technology developed by Digital Asset.[17][18]

December 2018: The company announced that Blythe Masters is stepping down as CEO.[19]

March 2019: Yuval Rooz, former CTO and CFO is named CEO. Yuval was part of the founding team of Digital Asset.[20]

June 2019: Yuval Rooz announced that the company is pivoting to offer solutions focused on smart contracts rather than blockchain and DLT as such.[21]

November 2019: The ASX project to replace CHESS, its domestic settlement system, using DLT technology from Digital Asset remains on track.[22]

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.[23]

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.[24][25]

Digital Asset also offers a cloud-based version of this technology, Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which is available on the Google Cloud Platform. Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML) PaaS is a fully managed solution that developers can use to test and deploy DLT applications, accessible through Google Cloud’s Orbitera application marketplace.[26]

References
  1. Irrera, Anna. "Blockchain startup Digital Asset raises $40 million". U.S. Retrieved 2018-04-30.
  2. Michael J. Casey (11 March 2015). "Ex-J.P. Morgan CDS Pioneer Blythe Masters To Head Bitcoin-Related Startup". The Wall Street Journal.
  3. Aaron Timms (21 April 2015). "Derivatives Pioneer Blythe Masters Tackles Digital Currency". Institutional Investor.
  4. John Detrixhe, Matthew Leising and Silla Brush (11 March 2015). "Swaps Pioneer Masters to Lead Virtual-Currency Startup". www.bloomberg.com.
  5. Tom Braithwaite and Ben McLannahan (10 March 2015). "Masters joins cryptocurrency start-up". Financial Times.
  6. Sydney Ember (11 March 2015). "Former JPMorgan Executive Blythe Masters Joins Bitcoin-Related Start-Up". The New York Times.
  7. "Company Overview of Digital Asset Holdings, LLC". www.bloomberg.com. Retrieved 7 December 2017.
  8. "James Powell Joins Digital Asset as new CIO and CTO of Engineering" (PDF). Digital Asset press release. 26 July 2018.
  9. "Company Overview of Digital Asset Holdings, LLC". www.bloomberg.com. Retrieved 7 December 2017.
  10. "Blackstone's Tony James, Ex-Googler Gangadhar and Deutsche Börse Group's Leithner join Digital Asset Board" (PDF). Digital Asset press release. 18 July 2018.
  11. "Digital Asset Opens Developer Program for its Enterprise Smart Contract Language, DAML" (PDF). Digital Asset press release. 19 April 2018.
  12. "Digital Asset and Google Cloud Collaborate to bring Blockchain Solutions to the Cloud" (PDF). Digital Asset press release. 23 July 2018.
  13. Sarah Krouse. "Blythe Masters Quick Off the Block With Startup Buys". WSJ.
  14. Sarah Krouse (9 September 2015). "Pivit Raises $5 Million With Help of Blythe Masters-Led Start-Up". The Wall Street Journal.
  15. Michael del Castillo (9 September 2015). "Blythe Masters enters Wall Street's bitcoin tech race with her first issuance of a crypto-security". New York Business Journal.
  16. Swati Pandey (22 January 2016). "Australia's ASX set to lead in blockchain for public companies". Reuters.
  17. "New ASX technology improves the competitiveness of Australia's financial markets". Media Release, Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia. 7 December 2017.
  18. Zheping Huang (6 December 2017). "Australia is now home to the world's first blockchain-based stock exchange". qz.com.
  19. Kate Rooney (19 December 2018). "Blythe Masters, Wall Street's best-known blockchain cheerleader, resigns from Digital Asset Holdings". CNBC.
  20. Matthew Leising (19 March 2019). "Blockchain Firm Once Run by Blythe Masters Names Yuval Rooz CEO". Bloomberg.
  21. Izabella Kaminska and Philip Stafford (7 June 2019). "Digital Asset Holdings' pivot raises doubt over blockchain future". FT.com.
  22. Corporate announcement (November 2019). "CHESS Replacement - latest updates". The ASX Group.
  23. "ASX to consult on CHESS replacement implementation timetable" (PDF).
  24. "Digital Asset Holdings lifts the lid on blockchain architecture in 'non-technical' whitepaper". www.finextra.com. 7 December 2016.
  25. "Digital Asset Platform: Non-technical Whitepaper". www.digitalasset.com.
  26. "Digital Asset and Google Cloud Collaborate to bring Blockchain Solutions to the Cloud" (PDF). Digital Asset press release. 23 July 2018.
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