I heard in conference sessions throughout the week that the concept of community is at the heart of a more decentralised financial system and the products it enables. “If your business is powered by community and product, you are a Web 3.0 business,” said Fred Schibsted, Co-Founder at Finder during his presentation at Blockchain week.

Blockchains and digital assets have many different communities, of course. There are the crypto traders, the hodlers, the DeFi yield farmers, the NFT collectors who buy up Bored Apes or even NFT Tennis Balls from Tennis Australia and the developers building some seriously cool metaverse games (puts my 1980’s Nintendo Donkey Kong and Turtle Bridge to shame!). This diversity is part of what makes the blockchain world so exciting. But there’s another community that is less visible, but just as important: those providing the infrastructure upon which others can build amazing projects.

Building the rails

In her opening address, Senator Jane Hume compared the current state of the industry to the 1851 gold rush in her home state of Victoria. The frenzied pursuit of gold – perhaps the crypto of its time – made a lucky few miners very rich. But all of the ancillary services and infrastructure that the miners required, helped to build the townships of Ballarat and Bendigo.

Something similar is happening today. For example, Christian Wigstrom from payments platform Monoova pointed out that, although the business is not yet on blockchain, it services businesses that are. Demand from DLT-based technologies is providing growth for services that haven’t made the transition yet.

For those of us who believe that blockchain will be the operating system of economies and financial systems in the future, it’s critical that we build the right rails now. For all the excitement about crypto, the real world use-cases for even the best-known smart contract blockchains remain limited. That’s partly because of the cost and complexity that organisations face in building their own blockchain environment.

This is beginning to change – Blockdata [1] found last year that 81 of the world’s top 100 public companies use blockchain technology in some way – but it’s still in its infancy. And if the benefits of blockchain are going to be delivered to the broader economy in the form of greater efficiency and reduced costs, then companies are going to need access to DLT through trusted platforms that they can simply plug in to their own operations.

This is why the ASX has introduced Synfini, our DLT as a Service platform. A lot of people both within and outside the blockchain world may be surprised that a ‘CeFi’ exchange for conventional, regulated securities is building the rails for a more decentralised economy.

But our own business of clearing and settling securities transactions gives us a keen understanding of the challenges that many enterprises face in managing complex workflows that involve multiple parties.

Like blockchain today, our business has always depended on collaboration between a community of participants in financial markets. That community depends on ASX to provide a reliable, secure platform that meets their needs. But blockchain fundamentally changes the way that we can serve Australia’s financial community – and a broader spectrum of businesses.

Powered by the VMware Blockchain and Digital Asset Modeling Language (Daml), Synfini provides the means for businesses to develop, test and deploy blockchain-based services within the ASX ecosystem. It’s an environment which can foster trust via open-source code and strong partners, and offers a suite of supporting services they can access to assist their projects. Furthermore, when deployed with complementary blockchains, Digital Asset technology provides secure synchronisation between multiple parties across a wide range of technologies.

The new gold rush

Going back to Senator Hume’s gold rush parallel, you can see Synfini as our contribution to building a new digital infrastructure for Australia. This infrastructure is the modern equivalent of the roads, railways, docks, buildings, banks and stock exchanges that enabled Melbourne’s development in the middle of the 19^th century.

Quite a number of firms are exploring our DLT as a Service sandpit and development environment, but let me give you one example of how this works – and how collaboration is at the heart of this blockchain community, as it is with others.

KPMG, our first production customer, has chosen Synfini as the platform for hosting its application for the New South Wales Government’s Building Assurance Solution. KPMG’s application will provide a Trustworthy Index for buildings that is based on the source and quality of the materials and contractors used in their construction.

Each building’s digital footprint on the blockchain will allow interested parties to distinguish between compliant, resilient buildings and non-compliant, problematic buildings.

We see applications for Synfini across the economy, including financial services, where complex, multi-party workflows are common and market players are used to working with ASX. Most firms trying out Synfini today are financial institutions and I’m looking forward to updating you on how we will support their businesses.

The theme for day 1 of Blockchain Week was the ‘Mainstream Moment’ which is clearly here and now - we’re at a tipping point in terms of the adoption of blockchain technology by Australian and global companies. With Synfini, ASX is helping to build a new generation of collaborative digital tools to make that possible. A lot has changed since the gold rush in Victoria, but any new economic growth model still depends on the right infrastructure.
 

[1] https://forkast.news/81-of-top-100-companies-use-blockchain-technology-blockdata/#:~:text=Blockchain%20technology%20maturing,companies%20with%20live%20blockchain%20operations.