Provenance can be a problem, but there are answers as vendors such as BTP move into the space with solutions that help financial institutions gain confidence in the provenance of capital markets related assets such as data, financial instruments, commodities, and regulatory reports.
The company’s digital provenance solution, Chronicle, was made generally available in autumn 2022 and open sourced in January 2023, providing an open source platform, built to open standards and backed by blockchain technology. It allows organisations to immutably record, query, and efficiently and securely share provenance information about any asset in any domain across multiple parties.
BTP CEO and co-founder, Duncan Johnston-Watt, explains: “We are a digital provenance company that aims to guarantee the integrity of an asset by actively capturing the journey of physical or digital assets and tracking their ownership and location. All data is backed by blockchain technology, bringing transparency and trust to assets and markets.”
Csilla Zsigri, chief strategy officer at BTP, says the problems of current provenance solutions that are not backed by blockchain are that they are centralised, proprietary, piecemeal, or tailored to specific assets or industries, and therefore unable to provide safe and secure sharing of provenance data across organisational boundaries.
Chronicle resolves these problems by providing an open source provenance platform that is built on open standards and is domain-agnostic, but easy to configure for specific use cases, and can share data across boundaries. It is backed by the open source distributed ledger framework Hyperledger Sawtooth, which is hosted by the Hyperledger Foundation, although it could be backed by other ledgers. The platform also includes the concept of Chronicle domains that can be used to model specific use cases such as asset integrity management. These models are then compiled to create domain-specific APIs that interface with other applications and systems.
Chronicle, which Zsigri describes as ‘middleware on top of which use cases can be modelled’, is delivered as a software subscription, and can also be packaged as a managed service.
Use cases in capital markets include user consent management, where consent is an asset and is tracked by the software. In a KYC scenario requiring data privacy, by way of example, it is possible to use trusted and permissioned data already on the blockchain without a client needing to fill in loads of forms, provide copies of identification and enter into a lengthy email trail. Conversely, disputes about whether personal consent was given to share data can be resolved by looking at data stored immutably on the blockchain.
While these are early use cases of Chronicle in financial markets, BTP expects it to find more as the benefits of immutable records are realised, along with the company’s commitment to technology that is ‘open source all the way down’.
Subscribe to our newsletter
