ACTUS Protocol 2019 Roundup

Investment Announcement, Partners, Tech, Ecosystem

Wow, what a year! So here it comes, our 2019 roundup with an investment announcement, a brief review of major milestones that we have achieved in 2019 and some more recent developments. We are especially proud to have released the ACTUS Protocol Portal — a demo app and playground for the future of digital assets. Give it a try!

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Best,
Michael Svoboda, Nils Bundi & Johannes Pfeffer
Co-founders of atpar AG

Investments

Just recently we announced an investment of ConsenSys Labs into atpar. We are obviously thrilled to have the backing of ConsenSys, the most important Ethereum ecosystem investor and community driver. This investment not only allows us to scale operations and sharpen our value proposition but also gives us access to the ConsenSys network of industrial and community partners.

Partners

• PoC with Swisspeers. Earlier this year we started a Proof of Concept with swisspeers, a Swiss p2p lending platform, with the goal to tokenize Swiss SME loans on Ethereum using the ACTUS Protocol on Ethereum and allowing swisspeers to scale into more markets more quickly and at lower cost. Swisspeers has been a pioneer in tokenizing loans and leveraging blockchain, and Ethereum in particular, in order to provide a superior value proposition for their clients.
• PoC with Swisscom. With Swisscom and swisspeers we entered a partnership to explore how the ACTUS Protocol can be leveraged to bring Debt Tokens to the Swiss banking market. Swisscom is the biggest Swiss banking infrastructure operator providing services to more than 170 banks in Switzerland and has been a FinTech pioneer amongst others with the Equity tokenization platform Daura.
• Integration with Polymath. Ethereum’s killer feature is standardization. While atpar focuses on encoding the cash flow events along the lifecycle of financial assets our friends at Polymath have developed a standard protocol for the compliance events of securities. In a joint initiative we have integrated the two protocols creating an even more powerful solution allowing clients to issue, trade and service financial securities in a compliant manner.

Tech

• ACTUS in Solidity. We have successfully ported the ACTUS standards to Ethereum and implemented two ACTUS contracts, Principal-at-Maturity (PAM) and Annuity (ANN), in solidity. Therewith, we are able to cover the lifecycle aspects of all kinds of bullet-loans and amortizing loans with fixed payments. The implementation is open-source and available in our GitHub: https://github.com/atpar/actus-solidity.
• ACTUS Protocol for Ethereum. Building on the ACTUS solidity implementation we have developed the ACTUS Protocol that expands pure ACTUS specifications to the issuance, servicing, tokenization, and pooling of financial assets in a DLT environment. We have further made our implementation of the ACTUS Protocol open source and available on our GitHub: https://github.com/atpar/ap-monorepo.
• ERC-2222 — Funds Distribution Standard. A key concept of the ACTUS Protocol is that financial asset tokens not only represent the ownership of the underlying asset (or it’s market value) but, more importantly, the right to participate in the distribution of future payments as defined by the asset terms. Examples of such payments are dividend and interest distributions, the bond repayments or the distribution of payments from pass-through structures as known e.g. from asset-backed securities. Therefore, we have developed in a collaborative effort a funds distribution token standard which is known as ERC-2222 (see EIP here https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/2222)
• Demo Portal live on Testnet. This fall we published the ACTUS Protocol Portal (portal) — a lightweight web application leveraging the ACTUS Protocol currently running on Ethereum testnet. The portal culminates our technological developments by making the ACTUS Protocol accessible to non-developers allowing users to issue, service and tokenize financial assets as well as distribute payments among the token holders. The portal is publicly accessible so please check it out and don’t forget to give feedback: https://portal.actus-protocol.io. Also check out our tutorial videos.

Ecosystem

• Innosuisse Grant. Innosuisse, the innovation agency of the swiss government, has acknowledged the market potential of our product and excellence of the team and awarded atpar a coaching grant. Apart from giving us access to various high-profile innosuisse coaches this grant is also a proof for the significance of our product for the Swiss financial market and beyond.
• Selected for Kickstart Accelerator. atpar was selected as one of 10 fintech companies to join the 2019 Kickstart startup program. The 10-weeks program aimed at connecting the startups with industry partners in Switzerland and beyond and directly led to the partnership of atpar with Swisscom.
• Founding member of ITSA. A thriving digital assets ecosystem relies on the ability to unambiguously identify digital tokens — across issuer, market, and ledger. The International Token Standardization Association was initiated in 2019 with exactly this mission in mind. As a founding member we support this mission and are actively contributing to deliver on it.