Post-trade Use Cases on WeOwn Layer 1 blockchain

Published in

OwnMarket

5 min readJun 23, 2022

With our technology platform, WeOwn offers financial institutions a solution for the implementation of crypto trading, multi-asset tokenisation, custody, and secondary trading as well as the digitalisation of post-trade processes. The Digital Asset Gateway offers a uniform interface for all use cases between the WeOwn platform and the respective core IT system.

Blockchain-based digitisation of post-trade processes

Post-trade processes are important and take place after the actual trade has been completed — they verify the details of a transaction. Post-trade services have come to the fore recently as they offer financial firms the opportunity to diversify their revenue streams. Due to a combination of new regulations, the standardisation of derivatives, and the increased need for more complex settlement activities due to the growth of alternative investments, post-trade services are an area where some firms have the opportunity to outperform their competitors.

From a market perspective, several use cases can be mapped via WeOwn’s blockchain in combination with the Digital Asset Gateway Layer:

Settlement of transactions, e.g. “World’s first settled FX cash trade” (Jan. 2022). More information on these post-trade transactions can be found in the blog “Insight into the world’s first FX transaction by DeFinity on the WeOwn Layer 1 blockchain“.
Digital asset register for security tokens and transaction recording
Tamper-proof storage of data (e.g. votes) on the WeOwn blockchain

The following description refers to foreign exchange (FX) transactions as an example. The storage of other post-trade data would — apart from a few differences — be carried out analogously.

General process flow

The basic process can be divided into the two phases of pre-trade&trade as well as post-trade processes:

The first phase (pre-trade & trade) takes place in the respective special systems, whether these are FX platforms or voting systems. Following the executed transactions, the data is transferred electronically to the WeOwn Digital Asset Gateway. The data delivery can take place via an industry-specific protocol such as the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) or by providing files with transaction data.

In phase two, the data is transferred to WeOwn’s secure and scalable digital asset infrastructure. The data is checked for compliance, extracted, and stored. The data is displayed in the WeOwn Post-Trade Admin Portal for further processing and stored on the WeOwn Blockchain after automatic or manual approval. Both the original liquidity providers and liquidity takers can access the (anonymised) details of the transactions via the publicly available WeOwn Explorer. With the WeOwn Permissionless Explorer, we have provided another tool for retrieving transactions that displays additional asset-specific data.

WeOwn’s Digital Asset Gateway

The Digital Asset Gateway bundles all inbound interfaces, consolidates them and makes the data available to the respective subsystems.

Data can be delivered via a range of systems. These include the internationally used FIX standard as well as RESTful APIs or traditional formats such as an SFTP gateway. Incoming data is processed uniformly and aggregated in the “Aggregation & Consolidation” layer for comprehensive reporting in the subsystems.

Admin access via the WeOwn Portal

All data deliveries from all customers offering post-trade processes via the WeOwn Blockchain can be overviewed by the existing WeOwn Portal infrastructure. Here, further metadata can be retrieved for each transaction. In addition, it is possible to map approval processes in which storage on the blockchain only takes place after manual approval by a legitimate user. If necessary, transactions can also be canceled or corrected via the front end. The transaction is only stored on the WeOwn blockchain after automatic or manual approval.

For customers, there is access via corresponding portals that allow administrative access to the data of the respective customer.

Public access via the WeOwn (Permissionless) Explorer

The blockchain ecosystem also includes the WeOwn Explorer, which provides anonymised information on every transaction ever executed on the WeOwn blockchain. All that is needed is a call to the corresponding transaction hash:

Because much of the transaction-specific information is not stored in the blockchain, the Permissionless FX Explorer offers extended, public access to the stored information. Here, too, it is sufficient to call up the transaction:

The WeOwn architecture offers a secure, high-performance, and cost-effective end-to-end mapping of post transactions. Thanks to the Digital Asset Gateway, data deliveries from a wide variety of original systems can be received via a wide variety of interfaces and processed in a rule-based manner. The WeOwn admin and customer portals as well as the Blockchain Explorer provide the necessary access to the processed post-trade data.