Roundup #1 2020

Now that the turbulent first months of the Covid pandemic seem to be over, we would like to give you an update on our progress in 2020 so far. In short, we are doing well, have accomplished a lot, and enjoy riding the financial innovation wave in collaboration with great players in the ecosystem.

Growing Market Traction

We have been able to build a great pipeline of potential clients that believe in the value we add to their projects, solutions and platforms. We currently have several proof-of-concepts ongoing and some of them already completed successfully. Currently, we’re in the process of preparing everything for bringing the first pilot clients live.

What stands out the most in 2020 is that the blockchain assets space has matured notably. All the major players are seriously invested and are driving exciting projects — it will be great to see how all these will be rolled out over the next 6–18 months. Here are some highlights of what we are working on:

• The lending solution swisspeers has successfully used our smart contract framework in a PoC. We will publish a Medium post soon which will go into more detail. As a next step, swisspeers will test-drive our middleware product which abstracts away all intricacies of interacting with the Ethereum blockchain and opens up new opportunities to evolve their current business model.
• Advanced tokenization of financial products: we are excited to support two innovative players in ramping up new services that bring capital markets capabilities to currently underserved private markets. This project will leverage our capabilities of tokenization of advanced financial products at scale — the space is definitively moving from single issuances to multi-issuance and multi-product origination platforms.
• Digital bank tokenization services: The first mover’s that have their crypto offering and custody in place are keeping the pace up. Our value proposition resonates with them as they are aware that security token solutions alone will not be able to provide all the pieces they need to fully automate the lifecycle of financial instruments. We are involved in projects where we bring the pieces together: a bank with the necessary licenses and core banking infrastructure, security token solutions providing a compliant token and ‘Know-Your-Client’ (KYC) services, and “Know-Your-Product” (KYP) capabilities provided by us. We help them broaden their product shelf with our asset template approach and simplify the automation of functionalities such as the paying/calculation agent and reporting.
• There is really a lot more going on: we are prototyping direct issuance from electronically annotated term sheets in cooperation with a swiss law firm, we are working on the tokenization of a loan book to access alternative refinancing options, and with another major player, we are exploring the possibilities to listing ACTUS-based security tokens on a decentralized exchange (DEX). Last but not least, we found some great partners with whom we want to join forces to offer better-integrated solutions to the industry by combining security tokens, custody and our financial backend capabilities.

If you are interested to learn more about our value proposition I suggest that you have a look at our 10min presentation at the ‘Financial Infrastructure’ Disrupt Network Webinar. Drop us a line at info@atpar.io if you would like to learn how you can leverage our solution in your origination platform.

Contributing to Open Finance

We have put a tremendous effort into our product but we also see the need to further support maturing the nascent industry. Thus, we have contributed to and been involved in several initiatives. It gives us a great pleasure to work with all of these talented, motivated and committed people on the following topics:

• ERC-2222 is being used in Metacartel and the LAO: Both of them have chosen the ERC-2222 ‘funds distribution standard’ as the most feasible way to distribute dividends to its shareholders. See the Metcartel Whitepaper or LAOs smart contracts to learn how they have implemented it. It’s an important sign that the community recognizes the importance of such standards which extend the capabilities of ERC-20 tokens for financial instruments with cash flows.
• ITIN and UTL concept for security tokens: As a co-lead of the token identification working group from ITSA (International Token Standardisation Association) we have published a proposal for a unique referencing and identification concept that overcomes some of the shortcomings of ISINs for security tokens. It has been well received by the community and standardization bodies. But even more important, first projects are already using it (see the posts on ITSA’s LinkedIn page).
• ACTUS User Association Forum: As we strongly believe that we need open standards to create seamless and frictionless financial ecosystems on DLTs we are an active member of the ACTUS User Association. We are convinced that ACTUS is currently the financial contract standard that is best suited to overcome many of today’s pain points in traditional systems. Nils is one of the drivers at the user association to help marry the benefits of ACTUS and DLT technologies. And Johannes Pfeffer outlined in the recent association session how we have implemented ACTUS on Ethereum with the ACTUS Protocol (see the video here).

Finalizing our Minimal Viable Product

Early in 2020 we finished the first version of our open financial backend — the smart contract framework that represents the financial contracts and takes care of the financial life cycle on-chain. Since then we have ramped-up our middleware which will give our customers the convenience to access the functionality with the ease of clear APIs.

This infrastructure is currently being used and tested in several proof-of-concept projects. In parallel, we are preparing everything to bring it to production this year with the first pilot customers.

If you are interested to find out more about the financial asset stack we have built you might want to look into the following resources:

• Middleware Specification: Read the docs on how to issue and maintain assets via the ACTUS Protocol middleware. All available endpoints are documented in the specification.
• Documentation: Find documentation on the smart contract system and other developer tools as well as a general primer on how ACTUS Protocol works.
• Demo Portal: We have set up a demo portal for ACTUS Protocol on testnet. Give it a spin to see how easy it is to build on ACTUS Protocol.

Through the close collaboration with pioneers in the digital securities space, we’ve been receiving valuable feedback and are actively adapting our roadmap to the needs we see in the market. Some of the features we are looking into are

• Electronic term sheet support: automatically and directly issue from your PDF term sheets making your deals faster and reduce manual errors
• More supported instrument types: stocks, certificates, open and closed-ended funds
• Tax reporting functionality: offering tax information as a service

As our financial asset services can be easily accessed through APIs we can help projects to boot-strap PoCs quickly and then subsequently reduce the time to bring those to market. We are happy to support you to integrate our capabilities into your solution. Contact us via email (info@atpar.io) or on Discord.