Buy-Side Technology Awards 2016: Best Distributed-Ledger Technology Project—Symbiont

Every firm in the space is, at the very least, looking into the technology that many believe will significantly disrupt the way the markets operate in the future.

This year, the Waters staff decided the technology had matured enough within the capital markets to create a category for it in the Buy-Side Technology Awards. However, the key to picking a winner in the category’s inaugural year was around selecting a vendor that has gone beyond simply talking about distributed-ledger technology solutions and has actually started creating them. 

Symbiont and its Smart Securities solution was the entry that stood out among a deep pool of candidates. The New York-based firm’s platform allows for the automation of business processes through a shared, secure and immutable audit trail. 

“Symbiont is unique because it has the only smart contract platform currently capable of meeting institutional requirements for privacy, security and performance,” says Caitlin Long, president and chairman at Symbiont. “Competing vendors are repurposing platforms that were designed to be fully open to the public, causing them to inherit design decisions that (so far) have prevented them from meeting the minimum institutional requirements for privacy, security and performance.”

Long says Symbiont has three specific performance advantages. First, the foundation of the platform’s processing power is key, handling 80,000 transactions per second on multiple nodes in a single region.

“We’re honored to have been selected by the judges in the inaugural year of this category, and especially so because we think the buy-side will be the biggest beneficiary of distributed ledger technology.” Caitlin Long, chairman and president, Symbiont

Second, users can store large volumes of data on-ledger without sacrificing performance, according to Long. This means PDF copies of legal documents can be attached to ledger entries, therefore avoiding questions around whether a contract written only in lines of code is enforceable by law.

Finally, contracts are amendable after they’ve been published to the ledger. If both parties agree to change the terms of a smart contract, they are able to do so. While the ledger history remains immutable, a record of the original and replacement agreement will be made available to both parties, Long says, allowing firms to amend contracts. 

Firms have taken notice of Symbiont’s strides: Credit Suisse announced in September that it was using Symbiont’s technology for a pilot project in syndicated loans, while in June, European insurance company Allianz and Nephila Capital completed a pilot program using Symbiont’s platform for a catastrophe swap transaction.