PeerNova and State Street have been trialing a blockchain-enabled platform for the tracking and monitoring the flow of funds. The two partners anticipate completing all the relevant milestones by October 2016 and will eventually move forward to a pilot phase right after the trial, Gangesh Ganesan, CTO and co-founder of PeerNova told Bitcoin Magazine . The trial program uses PeerNova’s technology Cuneiform, a big data platform designed to support the speed and scale required by large financial institutions, while incorporating key characteristics of blockchain technology including immutability, verifiability and security. The trial aims at assessing the potential of blockchain technology to track the lineage of capital with greater certainty than traditional infrastructures. Custodial banks manage trillions of dollars of invested capital on behalf of their clients. These include asset managers, asset owners, insurers, official institutions, hedge funds and private equity funds. The new platform could provide State Street’s clients with more transparent, timely and auditable reporting methods. Hu Liang, senior vice president of the Emerging Technologies Center at State Street, said in a media release that tracking the flow of investment capital was critical for fund managers, particularly to calculate the performance of their investments. He noted that if the trial proves to be a success, the potential to provide this higher degree of precision and verifiability would bring "meaningful value” to thei clients. State Street, a leading provider of financial services, started actively exploring blockchain in late 2015 when it joined R3’s blockchain consortium and separately launched a number of experiments with blockchain, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. Liang said at that time that blockchain technology could be a real game changer, substantially transforming how financial transactions are recorded, reconciled and reported — all with additional security, lower error rates and significant cost reductions. […]
