"Atomic" settlement between DLT + Tradfi infrastructures

Last week I was at the AFME OPTIC conference which is an event focussed on the role of emerging tech in capital markets.

A very interesting event to learn how banks and financial institutions are investigating and planning to use DLT in their operations.

Particularly of interest to me was a session on “Atomic Settlement” of DvP trades.

During that session some slides were presented by Paolo Bramini of Banca D’Italia highlighting the approach they are taking. After a little digging around I found a paper corresponding to the slides presented.

The paper presents a number of methods to enable atomic settlement between a distributed ledger and a banking payment system.

It falls short in a number of areas, atomicity isn’t really present in any of the methods, especially with regards to execution or commitment. The paper details a number of safety failure cases and how to resolve them which would not be required if atomicity was truly present.

I believe a better system can be developed which has much stronger atomic & safety features. Either with Babylon + components of Cerberus, or even with Cassandra.

It is something I’m going to dedicate some time to over the next couple of weeks and I may need some community support with some of the peripheral components (basic front end, a mock payment system / orchestrator detailed in the paper).

Also community suggestions how to architect and produce a better method are welcome!

This isn’t “commissioned” in anyway, but if we do produce an improved alternative, I’m in contact with the the right people at AFME.

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Sounds like an awesome plan. Enough Community members around with the needed skills for the “peripheral components”.

The way i read it, it sounds like this is actually what Babylon provides out of the box and an “easy” showcase of it’s capabilities.

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Here’s some information on the bigger picture here if not so familiar with this, the ECB are running trials on 3 different interoperability type solutions for DVP.

  • Trigger Solution developed by Bundesbank
  • TIPS Hash-Link developed by Banca Italia
  • Full DLT developed by Banque de France

The first 2 are simulating settling the cash leg in ECB systems (T2, TIPS), the last one is on a DLT solution. They are currently in the middle of these trials which ends in November.

There are 3 documents in this link on the separate solutions


The middle one ib the image is complimentary to the doc you posted, the other 2 may be of interest to you as well.

This is a link to a presentation on the trial and the solutions:

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Yes this very interesting but based on what it is explained in the focus session this is an explorative work that is being conducted right now and it is quite near to the end.
It was open to any DLT platform that did need to register for participation so now what should a better system be useful for ? Perhaps it is better to look for the end of this explorative work and think about the next when and if available

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This looks interesting. Count me in for whatever Frontend-UI/Branding you need for something related to this platform. Maybe even user flows, platform participants, etc.

I think we need to know what it does first before we start modelling the Ui for it.
Some Figma Jam or any other collaborative sketching tool would be good to draw some Mind Maps/Flows of what’s happening on the platform.

Had for a while in the back of my head some Radix Payments platform, but ultimately to make it work flawlessly it needs fiat integration/onramping. Or use Radix as rails for fiat payments. Something like Strike does with Bitcoin if I’m not wrong.

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