Digital Asset Holdings acquires Swiss startup Elevence
Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset (Photo: Institutionalinvestors.com)
Zurich – Digital Asset Holdings (Digital Asset), a developer of distributed ledger technology for the financial services industry, announced that it has acquired Zurich-based Elevence Digital Finance AG (Elevence), a technology firm that has developed an expressive language for financial institutions to model and execute agreements with certainty and finality.
This technology complements Digital Asset’s existing software by providing a new, verifiable way for parties to a transaction to independently prove updates to a distributed ledger while preserving data confidentiality. The Elevence and Digital Asset teams will join forces, significantly increasing Digital Asset’s technical team, while expanding its European presence with the opening of a Zurich office.
Elevence CEO will join Digital Asset as Head of Digital Asset Switzerland and Head of Product for Europe
Elevence comprises a team of eight experienced software architects, specialized consultants, and financial professionals all with backgrounds in functional programming, quantitative finance and algorithmic trading, with a PhD and/or Masters in Computer Science or related fields. Elevence Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Vincent Peikert, will join Digital Asset as Head of Digital Asset Switzerland and Head of Product for Europe, and Dr. James Litsios, Chief Technology Officer, will become Head of Development, Switzerland.
“With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Elevence’s technology and its team of talented individuals to enhance our offering for the financial services industry,” said Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset. “The resulting Digital Asset platform is specifically designed to address financial services applications requiring automation, privacy and immutability.”
Unified view of current and future rights and obligations on a need-to-know basis
Elevence has developed a powerful modeling language capable of expressing any right or obligation, including cash, securities and derivatives, whereby the code defines the considerations between parties, and determines how these contractual relations can evolve over time. This provides relevant parties with a unified view of current and future rights and obligations on a need-to-know basis, rather than revealing confidential information as in Smart Contract systems.
Elevence’s technology will be integrated into the Digital Asset software stack, combining modeled asset workflows with a distributed ledger to ensure that previously siloed records are synchronized and accurate. By building upon Digital Asset’s core technology, it will accelerate Digital Asset’s ability to scale globally. (DA/mc/hfu)
