Investors Can Now Trade Ether and British Pounds on the Same Blockchain – CoinDesk

A team of former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) engineers is bringing trading and settlement of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, to a private blockchain network originally developed for enterprise.

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, London-based LAB577, led by ex-RBS innovation lead Richard Crook, is rolling out its first platform offering, the Digital Asset Shared Ledger (DASL, pronounced “dazzle”). DASL is built on top of the Corda Network, the open-source blockchain system created by R3, a bank consortium that once personified the “blockchain, not bitcoin” ethos of 2015-2016.

As such, it’s a sign of how much the industry has evolved that DASL will be used to facilitate the trading of bitcoin, ether, and the like.

Crook told CoinDesk:
“Crypto is clearly converging with blockchain. We spent quite a lot of time in 2015 separating the two, to make sure we could have a conversation about blockchain, and now here we are converging the two back.”

LAB577 is working with prime brokerage BCB, which will park its clients’ assets, both fiat and crypto, with custodians; mirrored representations of these assets will trade on Corda, in a process known in blockchain parlance as layer 2 settlement.

(A similar arrangement is in the works to bring ethereum tokens onto the architecture R3 is building for Swiss stock exchange SIX.)

In this way, investors will be able to conduct both legs of a trade, whether fiat-to-crypto or crypto-to-crypto, on the same system, and have them settle instantly and simultaneously, instead of waiting days for a bank transfer, or minutes (sometimes hours) for a public blockchain confirmation.