Joseph Lubin, Co-Founder of Ethereum and Founder and CEO of ConsenSys, has invested US$6.5-million as part of the Series A funding raised by a blockchain-based financial technology (fintech) startup DrumG Technologies, founded by several senior-level executives from R3, an enterprise blockchain software company, and Ethereum's competitor. DrumG is working on building enterprise distributed ledger applications for the global financial services industry. ConsenSys is the sole investor in this funding round and Lubin will serve on the DrumG's board of directors. He said:
"We are excited to partner with DrumG Technologies as a strategic investor and as a part of our broad portfolio of activity in the enterprise distributed ledger space. The team's proven experience in delivering enterprise solutions to regulated capital markets, combined with its deep knowledge of the blockchain technologies makes it a valuable part of the ConsenSys global financial services offering."
Earlier in February of this year, Forbes, in a first-of-its-kind compilation, had listed Lubin as the second wealthiest person in the world of cryptocurrencies with the net-worth US$1-5 billion.
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DrumG has started work on two enterprise applications. The first is the Titanium Network, a decentralized, anonymous and cryptographically secured over-the-counter (OTC) consensus data solution for investment bank trading and valuation operations, which includes Credit Suisse as a network founding institution. The existing OTC data-sharing, the company says, involves an expensive, centralized, bilateral process with highly limited control over submitted data, forcing institutions to buy their data back for consensus insight. Emmanuel Aidoo, Head of Distributed Ledger Technology Strategy at Credit Suisse, said:
"We are excited to work with the DrumG team and serve as a founding institution for the Titanium Network which will build the next generation OTC securities consensus pricing service. We look forward to welcoming other financial institutions to the Titanium Network."
With the Titanium Network, DrumG is aiming to deploy a faster, more capable and significantly cheaper option leveraging blockchain technology, returning control of valuable OTC data back to the banks and enabling true data ownership. The system is being developed on the next generation Enterprise Ethereum platform, and DrumG is preparing for a Q2 2019 live deployment. Tim Grant, CEO of DrumG, said:
"We have seen tremendous evolution of enterprise blockchain platforms in this space over the last three years and the level of sophistication and preparedness within the financial services community has also increased."
The second solution DrumG is working on is a post-trade reconciliation network for hedge funds, prime brokers, fund administrators, and auditors, enabling a validated, auditable and permissioned view of transactions and holdings between market participants. The solution is proposed to be built on R3's Corda Enterprise platform with a view to deployment in late 2019. DrumG is currently working with significant industry players to form the network of founding institutions.
DrumG was founded in June 2017 and currently has a team of over 20 members from institutional financial services and technology firms such as UBS Investment Bank, Barclays, J.P. Morgan, Bloomberg, IBM, PwC, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, UBS O'Connor, Millennium Management, GETCO and Pivotal, while several members, including the founding team, held management positions at R3.