Goldman Sachs and Citi processed Blockchain Equity Swap Transaction on Axoni’s distributed ledger Network

Goldman Sachs and Citi processed first Blockchain Equity Swap Transaction with live data on AxCore, Axoni’s distributed ledger network.

Founded in 2013, New York-based Axoni specializes in distributed ledger infrastructure. Major financial institutions like HSBC, JP Morgan, NEX Group, Franklin Templeton Investments, Wells Fargo, as well as Citi and Goldman Sachs have invested in the Axoni. The company has raised a total of $57 Million in funding over 2 rounds to date, according to CrunchBase.

The current process of equity swap involves each trading party maintaining books and records to track trade lifecycle changes. Due to the huge amount of data, there is frequent data break which involves manual efforts to reconcile the records. This incurs a lot of operational costs, notes the announcement.

Executive Opinion

Head of OTC Markets at Axoni, Carl Forsberg, said, "Axoni is thrilled to see this network coming alive and being used in production by our partners. The level of collaboration across firms on this initiative to drive feature roadmaps and standards has been impressive, the outcome of which is poised to have a substantial impact on post-trade processing across the industry."

Managing Director, Global Head of Market Solutions at Goldman Sachs, Brian Steele, said: "Goldman Sachs continues to embrace new technology solutions which enhance our front-to-back client experience and deliver operational efficiencies.  We are excited to be working with innovative tech companies like Axoni, and our industry partners, to develop post-trade solutions which automate business processes and synchronize data on common infrastructure."

Equity Swap on Axoni's Blockchain Network

The effort from Axoni and a working group of fifteen of the leading sell-side and buy-side firms have resulted in a distributed infrastructure. As an outcome of this multi-year effort, the distributed infrastructure enables both sides of an equity swap to be synchronized throughout their lifecycle, communicating changes to each other in real-time.

The participating firms have standardized on equity swaps lifecycle representation. These standardizations spanned across initial trade confirmation, cash flows, amendments, and corporate actions.

The platform uses smart contracts and mitigates risks in post-trade processing of equity swaps, notes the announcement.