Enterprise blockchain in finance

Idealogic defines an enterprise blockchain as a permissioned, shared ledger that a known group uses so that no single party owns the master copy. Its advice is to start permissioned or hybrid; many hybrid designs keep the business logic among known parties and use a public chain for settlement.

One base is Hyperledger Besu. The LF Decentralized Trust describes it as an Ethereum client under the Apache 2.0 license, with permissioning at node and account level and the consensus protocols IBFT2 and QBFT; it names tokenization, settlement, CBDCs and trade finance as financial uses. Canton, built on the Daml language, gives each participant its own ledger and synchronizes only the parts of a transaction both sides need, as the page on Canton Network explains.

In finance, enterprise ledgers move money and collateral. J.P. Morgan's Kinexys ran its deposit token JPM Coin on a private ledger before moving JPMD to the public network Base, as the page on tokenized deposits describes. Canton lists more than 300 billion dollars in daily US Treasury repo trades on its own site, and DTCC partnered with Digital Asset and Canton Network to tokenize part of the US Treasuries it holds.

In Germany, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, DZ Bank, UniCredit and Helaba piloted a shared Commercial Bank Money Token for corporate payments. The cash leg for tokenized securities is the subject of the Eurosystem's Pontes work, covered on the page on wholesale CBDC.

An enterprise ledger is only as useful as the number of parties that write to it. Idealogic names two failures: the trade platform TradeLens was shut down in 2023 and we.trade became insolvent in 2022, both because too few independent organizations committed their data. Its rule is to secure the consortium before choosing a platform.

For a bank the questions are who runs the validator nodes, who may read which data, and how the ledger connects to payment systems and to public chains. Oracle networks such as Chainlink connect ledgers to outside data and to each other; Chainlink runs a super validator on Canton.

The infrastructure large institutions need was the subject of Tokenization & On-Chain Capital Markets, a Point Zero Forum side event in Zurich with speakers from 21X, Franklin Templeton, DFNS, AMINA and Chainlink. At the Frankfurt Forum on Digital Assets & Applications, DekaBank, 360X, 21X and Seturion discussed design choices for DLT market infrastructure.

A shared ledger that a known group of organizations runs to keep one set of records, with access limited to approved participants and rules set by the group.

Canton Network, private networks built on Hyperledger Besu, and bank-run ledgers such as J.P. Morgan's Kinexys. Several banks also issue on public chains such as Polygon and Ethereum.

Mostly. An enterprise blockchain is usually permissioned, but hybrid setups keep business data among known parties and use a public chain for settlement.