Axoni, Clearmatics Claim Milestone for Blockchain Interoperability

Two of the most prominent startups in enterprise blockchain are teaming up to tackle the hard, but now seemingly inescapable problem of interoperability.

At Consensus 2018 this week, Clearmatics and Axoni demonstrated how a financial derivative can be issued via a smart contract, trigger a payment and then instigate a cross-chain atomic transfer of value between two distinct networks.

The milestone is important because interoperability is now emerging as a key design goal of distributed ledger technology.

While the financial world may be moving from a state of many ledgers to fewer ones, blockchain architects have come to realize that trades, deals and transactions will probably never be originated, processed and settled by a single, monolithic system.

Axoni, based in New York, is working with a wide range of leading financial institutions and infrastructure providers to move trillions of notional value in U.S. dollars onto blockchain tech across a variety of asset classes.

Axoni has also been doing a lot of work in the derivatives space and other areas of post-trade processes, while Clearmatics is focused on the settlement side of things, so the pairing was an obvious fit.

Stepping back, it's fair to say blockchain interoperability is at the R&D stage.

The same spirit extends to the public blockchain community, where a lot of cutting-edge work is being done on the very technical aspects of the topic.

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