About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

BTP is on a mission to build trust in capital markets, Chronicle is its digital provenance solution

Subscribe to our newsletter

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

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Streamlining trading and investment processes with data standards and identifiers

Financial institutions are integrating not only greater volumes of data for use across their organisation but also more varieties of data. As well, that data is being applied to more use cases than ever before, especially regulatory compliance and ESG integration. Due to this increased complexity of institutions’ data needs, however, information often arrives into...

BLOG

Rise of Data Products Excites Data Management Summit London

Squeezing the most value from data has become the key driver of data management innovation in the past few years. Among the tools garnering most attention in this quest is an approach that treats data as a consumer product. The theory is a simple one. By packaging datasets as well and data-centric services and products,...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 15th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...