A patent for an electronic settlement platform for tracking and settling digital assets, obligations, and transactions has been filed with the United States Patent Office. Filed in April 2016 by Digital Asset Holdings ( DAH ), the digital asset settlement method which includes receiving an authorization for a conditional transaction involving a digital right from a first user is digitized on a distributed ledger. DAH, a developer of distributed ledger technology for the financial services industry, tends to differentiate itself from others is by using a method that allows matching the authorization for transaction from the first user with an authorization for transaction from at least one other user to settle the transaction with other users if the conditional is met and memorialize the settled transaction on the distributed ledger. Current platforms built to support digital assets on top of Bitcoin-like or blockchain-like systems are not structured to provide comprehensive protection to financial institutions as may be required by law for many of their existing transaction businesses. They follow a traditional way to scale trust which is to concentrate activity into trusted, and by extension often very large, third parties with positive and negative externalities. Trusted third parties have standards of control and visibility and also represent concentrated single points of failure particularly in the modern world of cybercrime. The question of who scales trust across trusted third parties has fallen on governments or even larger trusted third parties. This is inefficient and may be increasingly difficult to secure. They may not have contemplated the regulatory regime for financial institutions and financial transactions in general which have made investors be hesitant to enter the digital assets market and have avoided the use of distributed ledgers for their existing businesses. Existing closed, centrally administered ledgers utilized for settling assets, obligations, […]
