Regulated Digital Assets & Currencies

Regulated Digital Assets & Currencies

Overview

As the financial world embraces tokenization from stablecoins to bank monies, such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized deposits, securities, bonds, and real-world assets, we are witnessing a transformation in how the lifecycle of financial assets is being managed.

Tokenization refers to the digital representation of a business asset on the blockchain. As such, it not only introduces greater transparency and efficiency, but also opens the door to a more inclusive, secure, and innovation-driven economy. However, this shift also brings forward significant legal, business, and technical challenges, which demand enhancements to current technologies and infrastructures.

With decades of leadership in financial transaction processing, IBM combines permissioned distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), a strong open-source culture, and the deep expertise of IBM Research to tackle the most pressing challenges in decentralized trust.

Our Decentralized Trust team at IBM Research has made significant strides in this space—developing advanced protocols published in scientific journals and delivering implementations that are open-sourced under the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust initiative.

Guided by a business mindset aligned with current and future market needs, we enable the creation of differentiated, scalable, and secure infrastructures—including quantum-secure solutions—for the next generation of financial systems.

Technology stack

IBM’s software stack for digital assets and currencies, alongside innovations from IBM Research, offer both immediate solutions and the groundwork for a trusted and scalable financial future.

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The software stack enables the development of highly differentiated solutions, ranging from tokenized forms of bank monies (central bank or commercial bank), digital securities or regulated liabilities, all the way to stablecoins, strongly connected to the blockchain ecosystem. Our stack comprises:

1. Programmable platform: A high-performance distributed or centralized ledger technology, capable of processing over 100,000 transactions per second, designed for the demands of regulated environments and based on Hyperledger Fabric-X, an enhanced version of Hyperledger Fabric for digital assets use cases.
White paper: "A Framework for Resilient, Transparent, High-throughput, Privacy-Enabled Central Bank Digital Currencies"

2. Application accelerators, i.e., reusable libraries that shorten the time to value for digital asset / currency application developers:

This highly innovative software stack that is infrastructure-agnostic, although it is best adapted to optimally operate for full-stack security and attain even better performance gains on IBM’s hardware-based security products. More specifically, our software stack is offered on top of the LinuxONE operating system, which can be combined with IBM Digital Asset Haven for key management and digital asset custody as well as with IBM Hyper Protect Virtual Servers for hardware-guarded compute.

IBM’s software stack differentiated capabilities

Our SW stack includes novel enhancements of these technologies to fulfill the demanding (and sometimes contradicting) requirements imposed by central banks, commercial banks, or financial institutions in support of a variety of use cases such as central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), tokenized deposits, bonds, securities, and stablecoins:

  • Transactional privacy with settlement transparency and audit-support compliance
  • Transparency as a foundation of trust and security
  • Our system's architecture can scale horizontally and up to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with advanced resilience (no single points of failure)
  • Interoperation with legacy or modern systems (e.g., EVM), as well as with complementary traditional banking operations
  • Programmability and composability of assets and applications, as well as smart contract language independence enabling the building of a system with technology agnosticism (avoiding vendor lock-in)
  • Quantum readiness and agility to convert to quantum resilience while ensuring business continuity

Our platform is programmable, resilient, and exceptionally scalable (100K+ TPS), offering clients agile interoperability and enterprise-level privacy, alongside audit compliance with transparency through novel cryptographic protocols. We provide strong accountability with the extension and integration of emerging civilian identity and KYC standards.

We also offer technologies and cryptographic components that enable privacy-preserving liquidity pools, which can extend to arbitrary on-chain computation with quantum resilience.

Hyperledger Fabric-X Github repositories

Contact information

Would you like to investigate the possibility of working or partnering with us? Please feel free to reach out!

Resources