Canada's Scotiabank Completes Blockchain Trial for Trade Reports

Blockchain services firm AlphaPoint has completed a proof-of-technology trial of its blockchain platform for Canada's Scotiabank.

The AlphaPoint Distributed Ledger Platform (ADLP), which was deployed over a multi-month project, allows for the digitizing of assets, creation of trade venues, and the managing of pre- and post-trade workflows. During the trial, the ADLP was deployed on both Microsoft Azure and AlphaPoint’s own hardware, the blockchain firm said.

The ADLP was first announced in late 2015 and the company has been “more or less in stealth mode since then”, with the Scotiabank deal being its first major public announcement. According to the company, it currently has 14 customers at various stages of testing and using the platform.

AlphaPoint declined to go into too much detail about the specific tasks for which Scotiabank has been using the platform. “We have to be a little bit sensitive in terms of specific use cases in the trial specific to Scotiabank,” Igor Telyatnikov, the startup's president and COO, told CoinDesk. However the company's statement indicated that trade reports had been sent as part of the trial.

Scotiabank was unable to comment for this article.

However, the ADLP can be used for "real world problems”, said Scott Scalf, EVP of technology at the company.

“It’s stuff I wish I had over the past couple decades as I was building and rebuilding various types of systems using legacy technology that didn’t have the holistic, complementary features and characteristics that we’re able to generate with a blockchain-based decentralized computing platform,” he explained.

Managing volume

Scalf said the platform was designed to handle large amounts of data and thousands of events per second.

“Just from a volume standpoint, the reality is, for these kinds of institutions to fully adopt this kind of technology, it’s got to support petabytes of data,” he said.

Scalf went on to explain that the platform has been built to maintain certain levels of privacy and anonymity, while also making records available to regulators:

“We’ve built from the ground up the ability to create private encrypted records not only about transactions, but even, within transactions, field-level encryption," he said, adding:

"This increases the privacy for a wide variety of utilizations, but we’ve done it in such a way that those records can be made available to appropriately authorized regulators.”

Legacy hang-ups

In its announcement, AlphaPoint claimed the ADLP will integrate with legacy systems, but that still presents its own challenges. While the tests have been positive for the company, the team points out that the implementation of a platform like theirs takes time.

“The reality is, and I’ve been in these organizations for decades, there is not going to be a massive switchover [in the short term],” said Joe Ventura, CEO and CTO of AlphaPoint, adding that “incremental adoption” is gradually leading organizations to broader, widespread adoption.

“What we believe, talking with our clients and partners, is there’s real-world value to be had leveraging this kind of platform and technology for smaller problems initially that could grow into solving big issues," he said. "But to do so you have to be able to participate in the existing ecosystem of mechanisms that they use for a variety of data processing and post-trade processing.”

Telyatnikov added that AlphaPoint will be making more announcements regarding its platform and its clients in the coming weeks.

Scotiabank Saddledome image via Shutterstock