ASX is welcoming the first set of new customers to Synfini, who will deploy a range of DLT-powered solutions over the coming months.

Dan Chesterman, ASX Group Executive, Technology and Data, said: “With Synfini, ASX is providing an innovative solution for customers to enable the building of a diverse ecosystem of products and services.

“Synfini has the potential to open up a new world of opportunity for companies, both in and outside financial markets, to design and build innovative, digital, multi-party solutions on ASX’s world-class ledger.”

Paul Stonham, General Manager Business Development, ASX DLT Solutions, said that since ASX’s DLT as a service ‘sandpit’ opened in January this year, more than 20 firms have ‘jumped in’ to explore the Daml smart contract language from Digital Asset for building multi-party applications. It extracts and simplifies business processes to make data accessible and optimises workflows using smart contracts.

“With Daml, organisations build applications that ensure systems remain in sync and entitled users have access to reliable, real-time information and transaction status at all times,” Mr Stonham said.

Synfini, a name blending the concepts of synchronisation and infinite possibility, is a full service blockchain technology offering powered by VMware Blockchain. It provides customers with access to ASX’s DLT infrastructure, data hosting, ledger services and support.

“This eliminates the need for organisations to build, run and support their own environment, reducing cost, complexity and risk,” Mr Stonham added.

Each party has invite-only and permissioned access to a synchronised and real-time immutable audit trail. This improves the accuracy of information and workflows, thereby reducing delays and the need for additional manual reconciliation. Automated consent management and sovereignty to data owners ensures each party sees only the data on the ledger that they have permission to access.

The platform’s committer nodes sit across several data centres and leverages Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) technology, ensuring reliability and integrity for all parties in each workflow.

Synfini uses the same underlying technology as ASX’s CHESS replacement, but is offered as a cloud service, allowing flexibility and scalability to ASX’s customers as their usage grows.

Yuval Rooz, Co-Founder and CEO at Digital Asset, said: “It’s great to see customers, like the ASX, using our technology to build additional solutions beyond the original use case. Synfini is a great opportunity for users to familiarise themselves with Daml, while getting new products and services to market faster in a DLT environment.”

Synfini has been chosen by KPMG, which is creating and operating the NSW Government’s Building Assurance Solution, as the platform to host its application. The KPMG application will provide a Trustworthy Index for buildings based on the source and quality of the materials and contractors used in its construction. This will enable interested parties to distinguish between compliant, resilient buildings and non-compliant, problematic buildings.

Other early adopters include Broadridge, which is developing an application that automates and eliminates paper for off-market transfers in the equities market; and Boulevard, which is building an ownership register for private companies. DigitalX will host its Drawbridge app on Synfini, a regtech application that helps companies reduce employee and director securities trading risks by automating the approval process.