Blockchain Startup HighCastle Teams With Digital Securities Exchange Archax
Blockchain-based share registrar and investment marketplace HighCastle has teamed with Archax, a forthcoming institutional-grade digital securities exchange based in London, to bring liquidity to digital securities.
Based in the UK, HighCastle provides the end-to-end technological infrastructure and legal framework for compliant offering, digital issuance, distribution, management, transfers and trading of private securities. Since establishment in 2016, HighCastle covers market data on more than 10000 corporate digital assets and provides access to multi-exchange trading within Top-10 crypto assets venues.
Founded by experts from the regulated financial markets world, Archax claims to offer a credible bridge between the new blockchain-centric crypto community and the traditional investment space. The Archax platform is designed specifically for professional investors to trade in security tokens, and is built using existing, proven, resilient, scalable, high-performance exchange infrastructure, hosted in top-tier data center space, and integrated into existing institutional trading workflow.
The strategic partnership will reportedly help increase the secondary market liquidity of digital securities issued on HighCastle’s Prime Issuance, Registry and Settlement Distributed Network (PrimeNet). PrimeNet is a secure permissioned distributed ledger built in accordance with the capital markets industry’s standards and accessible for issuance and settlement only through PrimeNet Members: regulated investment firms, brokers, exchanges.
Philip Millar, Executive Director at HighCastle, said that at HighCastle they provide companies and funds with a full technical and legal framework for compliant digital offering, issuance, distribution and transfers of securities on a distributed ledger and the opportunity to maintain a blockchain-based share register.
“By integrating with the Archax exchange, HighCastle will provide our issuers and their shareholders with the additional channel of trading and liquidity,” Millar said.
Archax is planning to list tokenized assets of all types, providing that they meet its listing criteria. Initially, its focus will be on the more illiquid assets like equity in private companies, debt, property, art and funds.
“The tokenization of all asset classes globally will not only facilitate bringing liquidity to currently illiquid and hard to trade assets, but ultimately will disrupt all traditional financial markets too,” said Graham Rodford, CEO of Archax. “Blockchain brings huge benefits in terms of the improved efficiencies and the difference it will make to the post-trade process will be truly transformational. HighCastle, with its focus on the issuance, distribution and management of digital securities, is perfectly placed to bring the benefits of blockchain to SME firms and funds, and we look forward to working with them as this exciting tokenization ecosystem gathers momentum.”
