First-ever Blockchain Registrar Transfer Agent (RTA)

The client recognized an area for significant disruption: secondary market asset discovery and settlement. Due to outdated systems and processes, investment managers spent countless hours discovering existing channels for asset discovery and initiating and approving private asset sales from multiple parties with antiquated processes. The client sought to reduce transaction settlement time for illiquid asset transfers from T+90 days to T+3 days.

A revolutionary blockchain platform  to onboard and connect investors to assets and settle transfer of private securities in an unprecedented window of time.

Our client acts as a registrar transfer agent (RTA) to record and maintain detailed records of investor transactions including transfers of securities and assets.

The Registrar Transfer Agent (RTA) platform is one of the primary methods to transfer assets in the secondary market. Service providers, administrators, and custodians all have varying processes and roles which are disconnected and require extensive communication and management to achieve the final settlement goal. Our client’s outdated liquidity platform and its participants were performing these transactions using a set of manual processes that could take up to 90 days to clear. The client sought to reduce the recording time from weeks to seconds for their fund offerings.

Due to our financial industry experience, blockchain expertise, and partnership with both Microsoft and IBM Blockchain, Chateaux was selected to build a minimal viable product (MVP) on IBM’s Blockchain platform. The MVP will increase efficiency and give strategic technological advantage to execute these trades. In the future, the MVP will be extended to include core banking features such as lending and tracing collateral, along with broker functions like trading and price discovery.

Prior to the introduction of the platform, up to a month was required to record transactions through a fragmented marketplace of service providers, administrators, and custodians. By leveraging the property of the blockchain to serve as an immutable record of a transaction, Chateaux built a complete end-to-end application solution to serve as a custodian of assets, able to perform primary and secondary asset registration, transfer, tracking, and reporting/audit functions in almost real time. The web app consists of a front-end solution connected to the IBM Hyperledger blockchain.

The project has already completed the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) phase and is now functional. The current Beta phase is intended to refine the platform and make it ready for clients in production. Deployment and testing of the MVP has further informed the success of the platform and garnered interest for larger deployment opportunities.

Chateaux was able to build and deliver the first MVP RTA platform on blockchain. The platform is the custodian of assets and performs primary and secondary asset registration, transfer, tracking, and reporting/audit functions. The processing time for transfer of private securities has dropped from T+30-to-90 days to T+3-to-7 days; following the rollout of the beta version, T+0 will be achievable.

The MVP RTA platform is a complete ecosystem where investors and their assets are registered, and transfers of assets are executed and recorded on the blockchain. The web app front-end has a user interface to manage, investors, assets, and transfers and perform trades, with transactions recorded in real time on the blockchain. Now that the MVP RTA platform is complete Chateaux is causing disruption within the secondary market by being the first to build and deliver the RTA blockchain platform.

Over time, the benefits of the platform may disrupt and transform the current RTA industry and serve as a basis to allow transfer of other low liquidity assets.

Our client is a leader in secondary liquidity headquartered in the United States. They offer a secondary market for hedge funds and alternative assets using their proprietary platform.