Blythe Masters’ Digital Asset Holdings Acquires Hyperledger and Bits of Proof

In March, Bitcoin Magazine covered the digital economy startup Digital Asset Holdings, headed by the financial superstar Blythe Masters, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive.

Digital Asset Holdings uses distributed ledgers to track and settle both digital and mainstream financial assets in a cryptographically secure environment where counterparty risk is minimized, and settlement times are drastically reduced.

Now, Digital Asset Holdings LLC announced two acquisitions, Bloomberg Business reports. The company bought San Francisco-based Hyperledger and Budapest-based Bits of Proof for undisclosed amounts.

“Hyperledger and Bits of Proof add valuable new dimensions to our product offering and great talent to our team,” said Masters. “We build tools to help clients harness the power of distributed ledgers to serve their own customers. We integrate financial infrastructure with a variety of innovative new technologies inspired by the blockchain. Different ledger technologies serve different purposes and all of those we integrate with are additive.”

Hyperledger, a finalist in the SWIFT Innotribe startup challenge, developed an innovative distributed ledger to allow banks and other financial institutions to clear and settle transactions in realtime. The company’s technology enables financial institutions to create multiple private blockchains across a known group of participants. Unlike other distributed ledgers, Hyperledger does not have an inbuilt cryptocurrency and uses a proven consensus algorithm capable of thousands of transactions per second.

Bits of Proof developed and deployed an enterprise level server to integrate blockchain technology into financial applications.

Hyperledger CEO, Dan O’Prey, will become Chief Marketing Officer of Digital Asset, and CTO Daniel Feichtinger will join the senior engineering team. Támas Blummer, founder and CEO of Bits of Proof, has joined Digital Asset Holdings as Chief Ledger Architect.

According to information disclosed to Bloomberg Business by a person familiar with the matter, several large investors have expressed an interest in funding Digital Asset Holdings and entered private negotiations. A deal could be announced in the third quarter.

In related news, Digital Asset Holdings and other leading-edge fintech companies demonstrated their products and services to dozens of top bank, venture-capital and technology executives at the fifth annual New York FinTech Innovation Lab Demo Day organized by Accenture and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

“[Digital Assets Holdings] is building next-generation, cryptographically secure distributed settlement and ledger services,” states the Innovation Lab press release. “The company will provide safe and efficient settlement of conventional and digital assets that eliminate counterparty risk and can reduce trade- processing time from T+3 to same-day settlement.”

At the recent Exponential Finance 2015 conference in New York, Masters said that Bitcoin’s underlying technology has the opportunity to improve settlement latency and system security for firms, and, therefore, the market for financial blockchain applications will ultimately be measured in the trillions. Digital Asset Holdings “bridges the gap between the blockchain development world and financial services,” she added.

“How seriously should you take [the blockchain]?” Masters asked. “About as seriously as you should have taken the concept of the Internet in the early 1990s. It’s a big deal.”

Image via Hyperledger

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