Blockchain startup Ivno announced the successful completion of the first global token trial on R3’s Corda, hosted on Microsoft Azure. The Ivno Corda Trial was a world first with 28 participating organisations creating $18 billion denominated Trial Tokens and transferred them in the Ivno network demonstrating how instantly mobile collateral tokens could be used for instant settlement, collateral management and effective cash transfer.
In a live demonstration of the Ivno Corda Application trial collateral tokens were moved instantly between nodes deployed by Raiffeisen Bank International, Natixis and a large UK bank. Trial participants also included CIB, DBS Bank, Itaú Unibanco, National Bank of Canada.
The existing financial plumbing and post trade processes are well recognised to be slow, inefficient, costly and outdated. Ivno’s approach of providing a universal and scalable solution is designed to significantly reduce costs, remove inefficiencies and create new business opportunities across the financial landscape. DLT has been estimated to potentially reduce bank infrastructure costs by $15–20 billion by 2022, and Ivno will be able to help achieve these savings, in addition to enabling costs savings across asset managers, exchanges, clearers and corporates.
Members of the trial were able to test Ivno’s core application in three use cases:
Instant Settlement — Ivno’s users were able conduct a live atomic swap of simulated ETF tokens in exchange for Ivno Collateral Tokens. Atomic swaps are a highly anticipated area of DLT and smart contracts as they promise users the ability to exchange tokens of value directly with other entities within a single, final transaction, without the need for an intermediary. This advancement of technology removes the possibility of failure of one side of the trade.
Real-Time Collateral Mobility — Collateral tokens will enable corporates, banks, buyside and brokers to instantly transfer high quality assets between subsidiaries/branches, enabling balance sheet optimisation and enhanced intra-day liquidity.
Instant Effective Cash Transfer — Large treasury functions can save significant cost and complexity by mobilising large value balance transfers between subsidiaries instantaneously without incurring the existing complexity and cost of transfer.
Daniel Halstead, Ivno’s co-founder said in a statement that the live services is expected in Q1 2020, while Marin Karaga, Tokenization Stream Lead, Blockchain Hub at Raiffeisen Bank International, said in a statement: “It was amazing to see liquidity being tokenized and then transferred and settled globally within seconds using the Ivno Instant Settlement Corda Application. Liquidity management will enter a new era once products and services like Ivno go live. RBI sees tokenization as a concept that will revolutionize many aspects of the traditional financial industry and is eager to participate in trials pushing this concept closer to practical implementation.