Today Ownera and enterprise blockchain firm R3 announced a collaboration around Ownera’s FinP2P platform that supports the trading of digital securities or assets from any public or private blockchain or centralized ledgers. The news follows Ownera’s recent funding that included backing from JP Morgan.
Numerous platforms are popping up to support the issuance of security tokens or digital assets. From an investor point of view, this potentially could involve the need to integrate with many blockchains and platforms for settlement and custody. FinP2P provides an order routing solution meaning an investor simply connects to the FinP2P API to be able to trade in any digital asset across multiple platforms.
Additionally, Ownera offers a unified digital wallet solution for institutional use. We believe this aspect is optional.
R3 was involved in the early trials of the FinP2P platform alongside the DTCC, ING and others. Today it was confirmed that organizations using R3 Corda would be able to manage Corda-based tokens alongside tokens from other DLT networks. Ownera used the term “inter-tradability” rather than interoperability.
“We believe that users should have the freedom to connect and interoperate with each other across multiple networks and markets,” said Todd McDonald, co-founder at R3. “We are excited to see the interoperability work emerging across the wider R3 ecosystem, such as the orchestration and “inter-tradability” of digital assets across Corda and other ledgers offered via Ownera’s FinP2P.”
The R3 Ownera relationship
For FinP2P to work, those that want to provide assets or services to the FinP2P network would host a FinP2P network node (which is not a blockchain node). Hence ideally for Ownera, many Corda-based offerings might want to add a FinP2P node to enable their solution to access all the investors connected via FinP2P.
Our guess was the collaboration was a marketing relationship between R3 and Ownera. However, Ownera declined to disclose the nature of the commercial arrangement but said it was much more than marketing. Ownera’s Anthony Woolley mentioned that the Corda FinP2P adapter was not trivial to develop. “It was important that our engineering team worked closely with the team at R3 to ensure this was done in a completely cryptographically secure and robust way that R3 would be happy to certify,” said Woolley.
Via email, Woolley elaborated on the wallet, saying it offers the following utility:
- The ability to hold assets tokenised on Corda alongside assets tokenised on other blockchains e.g. in the same wallet holds assets that might be on Corda, Stella, Ethereum, Quorum, Tezos, etc
- The ability to pay for an asset tokenized on Corda with digital cash or securities held on a different ledger. The FinP2P network orchestrates between the securities and payment leg of a transaction in real-time so that, for example, you can buy a security on Corda and pay for it using USDC
- The ability to secure your wallet holdings, including those on Corda, with the digital custody technology of your choice e.g., secure your wallet with Fireblocks or other leading digital custody solutions
- The ability to Pledge securities tokenized on Corda for lending or borrowing against digital securities and cash held on other ledgers.
R3 previously had a somewhat lucrative marketing relationship with Ripple, granting R3 options over five billion XRP tokens. Ripple and R3 had a falling out, which resulted in litigation that was eventually settled out of court, with R3 receiving the right to just over a billion XRP. Depending on when R3 sold the tokens, that was worth between $240 million and $470 million.
If the Ownera-R3 collaboration is a marketing deal, hopefully for both parties, this relationship will be just as lucrative.
Update: Feedback from Ownera was added to the article